22 January 2011

What You See

(Wind Farm in the Pacific Ocean. Photo LA Times.)

The conventional wisdom about what is going on in the wide world continues to chug along. I was going to talk about Adrian Lamo this morning, the third individual who played a major role in the WikiLeaks carnival.

Young Adrian has been called a “snitch, a traitor, even a war criminal,” and he has been getting death threats. Or at least his publicist says so.

I think I will just let it ride until another shoe falls. It is so cold outside.

PFC Manning is nice and warm in the brig at Quantico, Julian Assange is holed up on his 600-acre estate outside London, where it is well above freezing. They must be grateful for the respite in the UK, since they have taken a real beating from the snows of winter.

I have a pal out west who has been watching the wisdom seem to fray on the edges.

He is a Solarist, a term which has not yet passed into the popular vernacular like “Birther,” or “Warmist,” both of which have their ardent believers.

I am bemused by both, though in different ways. I won’t go off on the Birther thing this morning. I think the President is a legitimate, naturally born (how else does one do it?) citizen of the United States, and was likewise legitimately elected to the office he occupies. So what is the big deal about the birth certificate?

I am not hung up on the matter. Sooner or later the truth, whatever it is, will pop up. In the current outbreak of civility, I think it is unfortunate that just asking perfectly reasonable questions gets one branded with a one-word epithet by the media machine.

The other secular religion of revealed truth is the climate thing, which is now casually used as the basis for all sorts of things.

I was reading the Times this morning, and was alarmed to read an article that claimed “many” scientists are predicting that over the course of the next century, as much as a third of all species on the planet will go extinct if the temperature rises between 3.6 and 5.4 percent Fahrenheit.

Could go higher that, too, warns the United Nations Climate Change Panel.

That is what has me confused. I confess that the relentless drumbeat about carbon dioxide and greenhouse gases had beaten me down. The experts have done that to me before. I recall being terrorized by the dire warnings of Paul Erhlich about nuclear winter, not that I considered thermonuclear exchange a beneficial option for the planet.

I can tell you, as an aside, that it was quite a relief to get out of the atomic weapons business. But Dr. Ehrlich was spectacularly wrong on just about ever prediction he made outside of his original field of entomology.

But there was something behind the nuclear winter imagery. The common wisdom of the time was that we were entering a period of global cooling. You can look it up. It was quite a trend in the 1970s. That turned around with new climate models that resulted to today’s Warmist conventional wisdom.

The world seemed about to rush into some dramatic action, redistributing wealth to the developing world, shutting down the advanced economies and imposing a breathtaking system of cap-and-trade on carbon emissions worldwide.

The House even passed the Waxman-Markey Bill by a margin of 219-212. It seems like we dodged a bullet, if I may be permitted a martial metaphor in this age of civility, since it died in the Senate. The bill had all kinds of amazing things in it, and considering that the science appears sort of dodgy, is probably best left where it is.

We may need to save the hot air.

Over the past year there have been some curious events that have not, as yet, impacted the conventional wisdom. Baghdad had snow. China recorded the coldest winter in 100 years. North America has accumulated the most snow cover in a half century, and the upper Midwest is reporting the deepest snow since records were kept.

There are four major temperature reporting sources for global weather: The Hadley Centre of the UK Met Office, NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, the University of Alabama Huntsville and NOAA’s Real Simple Syndication feed) have released updated data. All show that over the past year global temperatures have dropped precipitously.

Except for January, of course, but we are not done with it.

This marks the rise of the Solarists.

Some scientists are linking the cooling to reduced solar activity- a lack of sunspots- that they claim has a much larger impact on temperatures on earth.
Before you release the dogs on me, for the record I do not know if the greenhouse gases are contributing to a warming trend or not. This is far more complex than I can understand, and apparently also more complex than those who claim to be professionals in the field.

Historically, the warm periods such as the Medieval Climate Optimum were beneficial for civilization. Corresponding cooling events such as the Little Ice Age, though, were uniformly bad news.

So while the Times continues to spew the conventional wisdom like carbon dioxide from a smokestack, I think it is worth a moment to consider the fact that what you see is not necessarily what you get.

None of this should be confused with the idea that we can keep doing what we are doing in energy policy. I was filling up the Hubrismobile yesterday, and left the radio on to listen to the President talk about the big jumpstart he is going to give the economy. I looked at the price on the pump, and hi-test was pegged at $3.40 a gallon.

I know they would tell me to get an electric car, though of course that would require building many new coal-fired power plants, and I should welcome more ethanol in the gasoline, though of course it takes more oil to make the fertilizer used to grow the corn to produce the stuff, or that fantastically expensive wind turbines are the answer to our problems.

These turbine constructions are so massive that they need 1,000 tons of concrete to hold then in the ground and a road infrastructure for maintenance, or placing them at sea where the cost of anchoring them is staggering.

I think T. Boone Pickens is the only one making sense these days with his natural gas scheme. With Mr. Pickens, what you see is exactly what you what you get.

Copyright 2011 Vic Socotra
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