(Dr. James Lovelock, medical and climate expert, and one of the oldest white guys you will run into. Photo 2005).
I got a couple quick knocks upside my cogitating noggin this morning. Splash was predictably loud about it. Rocket and Loma had slow smiles but no comment. DeMille was doing to some figuring in his Green Notebook. Mel just brushed some hair aside and got to the business end of things.
By means of background, we mentioned that our President is off to Europe for the COP26 gathering that will draw the rules for compliance to a treaty never submitted to the US Senate. You know, that 2015 “Paris Accord” thing none of us had a chance to understand or actually vote on. First, though, he met with the Pope at the Vatican. He introduced himself to a couple people there by saying “I’m Jill’s husband.” You can take that as a cordial joke, or in light of his recent series of inarticulate comments, maybe one of the last defining things on his mind. Then off to Glasgow.
Then the nine Cabinet Secretaries and he will join the thousands of delegates to the COP26 conference, who apparently are prepared to order us to curtail CO2 emissions by a minimum of 35% by 2035. They hope for more, we understand. If you are not keeping track, that is about half of the way to “Net Zero,” which they hope to achieve by 2050. I am thankful the ashes of the body I currently inhabit will be spread someplace convenient to my heirs.
Anyway, adding to all that is a report that the President and most of his Cabinet will be joined by Governor Newsom, whose state of California is blazing a trial of progress. The Governor will take 26 members of his house of delegates with him to show how committed they are to a treaty that isn’t exactly a treaty.
We have been following the climate issue in detail for what seems like a long time now. There was talk about the coming catastrophe back in the 1970s, and as practitioners of the military art we were naturally curious about what impact that might have on operations. At the beginning, it was about the contribution of humankind to the impending ice age.
Since that clearly would direct affect on ships and aircraft, we were drawn to the reports of a string of Typhoons that struck a familiar place to most of us, who were WestPac sailors. One of the guys actually had a dedicated meteorologist on his staff, and peppered him with questions about the time that things had to change in the crisis narrative, since it was clearly not getting colder. His weather-guesser could not find observational data to support the narrative of the time, try as he might to fit it together with the international narrative of Doom.
The lynchpin to the then-new interpretation of what the earth was doing was relatively simple, though a bit disconcerting. It actually appeared not to be getting colder, but warmer. James Hanson, the famous NASA scientist, was an architect in the political end of the changing story. He helped spice up the Senate hearing in 1988 that proclaimed the new, warmer version of the crisis. In order to augment his assertion, he and Senator Wirth’s staff ensured the air conditioning was turned off on what was predictably one of the warmer days in the swamp surrounding the Potomac.
See? All those Senators sweating in those fancy suits? Science is fun!
James Lovelock was one of the pioneers of the panic in those days, and very much in tune with Hanson’s view. The initials after his name are impressive: He was a credentialed scientist at the time- the initials after his name include CH, CBE, and FRS. He became a guru to the environmental movement with some bold predictions based on the theory that things were not getting colder, but rather warmer. He named his version of the theory “Gaia.” That one depicted our Earth as a single organism, subject to the emissions associated with our modern industrial world. It was a unifying theory, and widely supported by noted scientists like Al Gore.
There is a lot of talk about the climate these days with the COP26 coming up. It is surprising that NBC News covered it, but maybe some of their “news” team noticed that the mantra had changed because the weather wasn’t. The crisis is now about “Climate Change,” which as we understand it, is what it does. And has, for millions and millions of years without any help from us. But like we said, we believe in change. We are just not sure exactly what the change is, so the narrative had to have a new name that doesn’t claim anything but that. We agree.
Dr. Lovelock is now 102 and he recently updated one of his predictions. That is remarkable in itself. According to NBC, he will say “climate change is still happening, but not as quickly as once feared.”
That is a bit of a relief. He had previously painted some of the bleakest visions of the effects of climate change. In 2006, he wrote that “before this century is over billions of us will die and the few breeding pairs of people that survive will be in the Arctic where the climate remains tolerable.”
Despite his age, Dr. Lovelock is one of those scientists who apparently still looks at actual data rather than the dozens of computer models that all support the assumptions loaded, a priori, into the computers. According to DeMille, that is backwards. You know that the thirty-odd models best recognized in the climate biz vary so wildly that the current predictions are based on numbers produced by lumping them all together and then averaging them all to eliminate uncertainty. Heck, Dr. Lovelock even stated that he had a problem with CO2 in the atmosphere not having much to do with temperatures.
Like the fact that the Antarctic has been cooling for the last 40 years. Google it, if you doubt it. Google would never push a narrative of questionable value, would it?
Anyway, we will have hundreds of Americans in Glasgow. Some, a few, will have actual degrees in climatology. Most will be virtuous people with the intent and capability of providing hundreds of billions of dollars in taxpayer cash on a matter Dr. Lovelock says “isn’t changing as fast as we thought.”
That detail aside, the COP26 thing will provide the justification for the government to sternly tell us to get rid of the cars we paid for and buy electric vehicles that rely on charging from stations that don’t currently exist and hope the windmills don’t freeze like they did in Texas last year. Or the solar panels are not slumbering under snow.
This is actually pretty simple. We aren’t “a decade from Doom.” Rushing into something we are not realistically ready to do technically is going to mean problems. We all have lived among big machines that are dwarfed by the size of our oceans. If we are going to attempt something big, we prefer it is done right. We nodded around the Fire Ring at that one.
Splash got up and went out to yell at the weather.
Copyright 2021 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com