Evidence

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

If global warming is causing the snow in Atlanta today, it must have been blazing a century ago when we saw the Great Blizzard of 1888 on the East Coast.

The prairies have always had blizzards, going back to the Schoolhouse Blizzard followed by theArmistice Day Blizzard in 1940 and the 1952 Blizzard. Nobody thinks anything of them – it is supposed to snow like mad on the prairie and that’s not evidence of anything.

But Lake Superior is freezing over for the first time in decades.  Duluth is having the coldest wintersince Kennedy was President.  That’s got to stand for something.

Joe Doakes

All evidence that supports global warming, supports global warming. On the other hand, all evidence that undercuts global warming, actually supports global warming.

There’s a pattern here.

22 thoughts on “Evidence

  1. Agreed. I’ve also never been able to reconcile the Ice Age and subsequent melting’s that covered many now dry parts of MN with a rather deep sea (evidenced by marine fossils being found in various parts of our state) with the global warming agenda. Particularly when much of it occurred before man’s appearance on Earth.

    I think they waited a bit too long to revise the terminology to “Climate Change”.

  2. Ah, yes, but every time we have a weather event– cold or hot– the climate is changing, so the Theory of Climate Change is scientific fact, yes?

  3. I watched a Rosewell New Mexico conspiracy show on cable a while back. Watching these people……..when you really want to believe something is true, then every evedence you see comfirms what you want it to confirm.

    If I thought the police were out to get me, and I saw a cop car drive by my work place, I would say they drove by to check up on me.

    Enviros, like many animal rights people, hurt their cause by being so far over the top.

  4. People who believe that science can’t be corrupted by the non-profit grant system do not understand how science actually works, how researchers are paid, how their careers are fashioned, etc.
    The system is a bit different than ‘scientist has a neat thing he’d like to study, government gives him money’. Instead the government has public policy goals, and it pays for research to support those goals. If the government, rather than the people, makes its own public policy goals, you produce some very odd ‘science’.
    If the fundamental idea behind the research cannot be proven false, you are in fantasy-land.

  5. The reason AGW propagandists like to show the graph of atmospheric PPM of CO2 is because it shows a nice, smooth curve upward. This is because it is influenced to a great degree by the amount of fossil fuels that have been burnt. It is a sum, minus some constant for the amount that is reabsorbed. There are seasonal variations that raise or lower the annual measure with metronomic regularity, but overall the number moves inexorably upward. It’s at about 400 PPM now, vs. about 300 PPM in 1950. You can see a graph here: http://co2now.org/
    Real climate is not as easily measured and shows no pattern that matches CO2 PPM unless you massage the numbers and use your imagination. Antarctic and arctic ice sheets, Greenland icecap, glaciers, date of earliest and latest snow cover and earliest and latest frosts by altitude and elevation, sea level, seawater temps, and atmosphere temps are all very difficult to measure globally and the data is noisier than Hell.
    The whole scare rests on question-begging, the assumption that climate is driven by PPM of atmospheric CO2. This doesn’t mean that, say, the Siberian permafrost isn’t melting, it just means that you cannot demonstrate that any such melting is caused by the concentration of atmospheric CO2.

  6. Until we stop using coal to generate electricity, oil use is just as environmentally friendly as the alternatives. Natural gas generates half the carbon per watt relative to coal. The US has reduced its greenhouse gas emissions per capita more than the EU, entirely due to fracking. What’s not to like?

    Because having Europe pay for the gas they refuse to frack themselves is just deliciously ironic, and it helps keep our current account in balance. It’s commerce; best to keep the moralizing out of it.

  7. Emery, it is instructive to look at eh DOE’s charts showing what our sources of electrical power have been since 1900. It is sobering.
    All of them begin with a sharp curve upward as the easiest marginal resource begins to be used. Hydro grew dramatically between 1900 and 1940 — and then the curve went flat as we ran out of easy places to dam big rivers. The biggest change for the ‘green’ hasn’t been nuclear power, solar, or wind, but the conversion of coal fired plants to NG. It dwarfs every thing else.
    The DOE predicts that US electricity consumption will double by 2045. When you look at the numbers, the idea that solar and wind will one day make up a sizable part of US electricity generation is enough to make you double over in laughter.

  8. Storing and distributing energy are very real constraints on renewable energy today. In the short term, building fast, flexible natural gas capacity alongside renewable capacity is required. In the longer term, high-energy density capacitors to provide a ‘surge tank’ for renewable power are a critical need. There’s a lot of research on batteries, which hold power indefinitely, but we need to shift the focus to devices that can hold electricity for a period of 1-12 hours.

    Surely a high price for energy must go in hand with economic growth without energy usage growth. If energy prices were not high, would we spend so much effort on becoming efficient? These efficiency improvements don’t happen without expensive engineering. Looked at from an economic standpoint, sustainability will happen, if it happens, at a given cost for energy, which is probably higher than today’s and is not easily knowable. Sustainability at a lower cost can only happen if technology gives us a sustainable energy supply, which is cheaper than today’s hydrocarbons. That could happen eventually, but we’re clearly decades away from that point. The only other factor that might lower energy prices before or after reaching sustainability would be a falling population. While again that might happen eventually, there are no projections that show the earth’s human population fall below today’s level in this century. So sustainable energy may be in our future, but it will likely be expensive. The good news is that economic growth can continue despite decreasing and expensive energy use.

  9. “The good news is that economic growth can continue despite decreasing and expensive energy use.”
    By definition growth will be slower with expensive energy than it will be with cheap energy.
    Money spent on energy cannot be spent on investment, QED.

  10. Investments in electricity, internal combustion, or computing (for the most part) lead to a more productive society. We are investing wealth, but we are producing the potential for more wealth. That is what generates growth. Investments in medicine (for the most part) lead to longer lives for retired people who are no longer producing. Even when younger lives are lengthened, all that is returned is more humanity, something for which there is no shortage. Medicine is a luxury good, which does not generate further returns. I will happily make exceptions for vaccines, clean water and antibiotics, but the parsity of the list of medical technology that makes society more productive is revealing. A society that invests in medical technology, rather than technology that makes us more productive, is a society that is no longer focused on the future, but rather one that indulges our present fear of death, a fear that increases as we become less productive and more a part of the past than the future.

    I also find the expansion of the health care industry vaguely unsettling. I keep thinking of hospitals like the pyramids of ancient Egypt – monolithic transfers of wealth to the dead. It is not exactly rational, but then again, what are the fiscal multipliers in the health care industry?

  11. You are off in wacky-land, Emery. There is always a shortage of humanity. Medicine has a fantastic return. Spend money, get life. Who would not trade dead gold for life?

  12. My rose-colored glasses were first formed in Canada, where I lived into adulthood, and where my parents still live (and receive healthcare). I am also familiar with the British system, and have read a good deal about other European and Asian systems. You, on the other hand, appear to be drawing primarily from your own fantasy land, and perhaps a few Ayn Rand books.

    A functioning free market system requires a knowledgeable consumer, an assortment of suppliers, and a product that the consumer can choose to walk away from. None of that is true.

    Health care costs disproportionately more for some people than for others, based on their genetics, their luck, and their life choices. As a society most countries (and for the most part, the US) have agreed to socialize the costs of medical treatment so that poor people don’t die on the steps of the hospital for lack of cash or credit, and even a member of the middle class doesn’t need to mortgage their house to pay for a life-saving operation for their child.

    So in medicine you have a field where the free market is far from ideal, and where society agrees that to one extent or another socialist principles rather than free market principles will dominate. It’s going to be complicated, and it’s going to heavily involve the government. The question for the government is how best to do it, not whether to do it. The idea of a free market in medicine is a libertarian fantasy.

  13. Emery, how old are you? Are you depleting the air supply for some robust, productive youth?

    I think that’s so because you damn sure can suck all the air out of a comment thread.

  14. The question for the government is how best to do it, not whether to do it. The idea of a free market in medicine is a libertarian fantasy.

    Goobernment is a solution to every probelm for EmeryTheUSAHater, swiftee. He is an unrepentent Soci@list, hence his brain is indeed deprived of oxygen. This is the one time I cannot even say that would like him to go back to Canada, because they are turning the corner and don’t need a scumbag like him to put the brakes on.

  15. Emery, I am far, far from a Randian. As far as I am concerned, Objectivism and Marxism aren’t even opposite sides of the same coin. Both assume that your only worth is your social worth — determined by the market for Objectivists and State by Marxists. I believe that an individual’s worth is determined by God. Before you write that off as a silly superstition, please consider what you believe determines the worth of a human life.
    When you spend scarce health care dollars, who decides who gets what?

  16. A Liberal is a person who is confident he knows better than you, how you should spend your money, and is willing to use force to make you do it his way.

    A Libertarian is a person who is confident he knows better than you, how you should spend your money, but he’s willing to let you make a fool of yourself since, after all, it’s your money.

    Emery vacillates between the two, but the fact he does is a sign there’s hope for him someday.

  17. One of the reasons Libertarians will never form a potent political force is their holier-than-thou one-upmanship when they compare just how libertarian their views are. It’s like watching a bunch of vegans, another hilariously dogmatic group. I consider SiTD to be a relatively Libertarian blog, relative to most of the others. Please don’t tell me how you are more chaste and pure; I don’t care.

  18. I am more chaste and pure than you are, emery.
    Well, probably. You were raised in Canada.

  19. Emery,

    This blog has been libertarian-conservative since its beginning.

    From 1994-1998, I left the GOP and joined the Libertarian Party. And I noticed that the LP was *full* of people who believed what I believed. And talked about it. Endlessly. And one-upped each other, as Emery quite rightly noted, to the point where the Party became sort of a self-perpetuating purity machine. Sort of like the Minnesota Ron Paul clique.

    I left the Libertarian party because I figured there was a better chance of the GOP being influenced to push libertarian beliefs into policy than there was of ever getting a Libertarian elected to a significant office, much less a majority of them elected to a legislature.

    Which, by necessity, meant sullying a little Libertarian chastity and purity. You bet.

    And, by the way, it’s worked. The Tea Party wing of the GOP is a whole lot of people like me. And that’s a good thing.

  20. I was raised in Fridley in the 1960s. There was no place more chaste and pure than Fridley in the 1960s. Well, it was chaste and pure after they busted that cop who was molesting little boys.

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