09 December 2009
 
The One Percent Solution

Everybody talks about the weather, but no one does anything about it.
 
That is the old saw, and it reflects a certain resignation to the enormity of our mother planet and her capricious ways. There are eighteen-foot drifts of snow in Iowa, and I imagine they will be doing more than muttering about it as they start to dig out.
 
Just rain here, thank God. I watched it come down after cleaning up the wreckage of dinner. I had a Prime Rib in the freezer that I had rescued from the Chief of Staff of the Air Force’s spouse over at Bolling, and it seemed like time to cycle it through my weekly dinner for my son.
 
Nice rub to go on it, I can tell you if you are interested, high heat for an hour or so and it was tasty, along with fresh mashed potatoes, broccoli with a butter-almond slivers-and-Parmesan, hot biscuits and a garden salad with garlic croutons, crumbled bacon, mozzarella and cherry tomatoes.
 
I have no idea what the carbon footprint of the meal was, and don’t worry about it that much. Things are going to be different in the future, regardless of how the verdict comes in on the variety of issues confronting us.
 
I sent the left-overs away with my son as I tried to gather material for the obituary of the Admiral. I did not get far on that, looking out at the rain coming down on the Christmas lights on the balcony.
 
I ran through the Christmas gift list and think I am done, and will not obsess about it any more. I have pared the list of stuff down a lot and no longer do cards or worry about the next circle out of friends and even less of business contacts. If I ever have an Admin assistant again, or a Domestic Minister with the Thoughtfulness Portfolio, maybe I will care, but not now.
 
I heard and read the future on the radio and in the Times. The latter was temperate and realistic, from Tom Friedman, who cited the "Cheney Doctrine," of all things, that holds that even the 1% chance of something truly awful happening (in that case, it was al Qaida and Nukes) merits the commitment of resources. I agree with them both, though Friedman was talking about Climate Change, and acknowledged that there were problems with the science, but still, things have been warming since the industrial revolution.
 
I have the same problem with the science that I have bored you with all week, which is to say, that the scientists have eliminated the Medieval Warming Period and the Little Ice Age in order to fabricate the crisis of the present. But even if we are actually attempting to fight a natural trend that will brook no opposition, I freely admit that our profligate pollution of the sky could be exacerbating (or minimizing) a natural trend.
 
As best I can determine, temperatures on the most recent cycle peaked in 1998 and have been declining since, though in Copenhagen, the secretary-general of the UN Weather Office, a fellow named Michel Jarraud, asserted that this decade could be the warmest on record. That was the sound byte, anyway, since there was more.
 
The warmer temperatures were in central Africa and southern Asia. Not in North America, of course, or other places that are reasonably well instrumented, and where temperatures have been cooler.
 
I shrugged. No one has explained the quiet sun and lack of sunspots over the last two years to my satisfaction, but I agreed with Mr. Cheney and Mr. Friedman, who are both smart guys in their way. Even if the science is overstated for political impact, I think we ought to take it seriously.
 
More seriously than the scientists, perhaps, since it is their excesses in manipulating the data that has given the warming skeptics such a roaring good time this week.
 
The other accounts from what is happening in Copenhagen? The Third World wants billions in aid, of course, tens of billions next year, zooming up to hundreds of billions as the next decade rolls in.
 
I heard a pipsqueak Marxist on the radio yesterday, one of those preening little commissars who said that all the Greening of the home and office is passe. He demanded strong legislation to enforce compliance with energy consumption goals that would be established by an un-named panel of experts, presumably headed up by a progressive such as himself.
 
One of my pals sadly concluded in a note this week that the last-ditch effort of the Oil Companies to buffalo a gullible public filled with Deniers and Birthers was likely to succeed. He write that Copenhagen will issue mightily and not come up with much, and cap-and-trade legislation will be debated into a faint gesture rather than bold action.
 
I think he should take heart. The EPA declared yesterday that Carbon Dioxide is a toxic substance, and hence subject to regulation by the Executive Branch without the need of any Congressional Action.
 
So, we have international extortion riding on the back of bad science, with the Government striding forward to agree to the former and endorse the latter.
 
Oh well. Even if the science has been corrupted, no one said the earth doesn’t get warmer.

The question is how fast, and why. We apparently are going to go with a certainty based on shifting sands. But I suppose the one percent solution ought to be considered. At least the rain has stopped for now, even if the snowdrifts in Iowa are up to the second story

Copyright 2009 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
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