Alternate title: What if I were a platypus and other useless ponderings.
Eli at the hyper-progressive FireDogLake blog has many useless ponderings. Sometimes he even commits them to the electronic memory of Teh Intarwebs.
What if Global Warming were a giant meteor?
After reading this post by Bill McKibben at TomDispatch, I found myself amazed anew at the global warming deniers and cautious incrementalists who would gamble with the health of the planet rather than risk any reduction in corporate profits or wasteful excess. And I wondered, what would if I were to rectally impact my skull and fabricate an utterly vacuous analogy?
I may have changed the last bit around there. You can hit the link, if you like, to see where (though I suppose you can guess).
Where his analogy hits the skids is that spotting moving interstellar objects (like meteors), judging their velocity, speed, and the effects of the gravity from other stellar bodies and doing the mathematics to judge its trajectory are all as close to exact sciences as there can be. As a society, we already do these things reliably on a daily basis. And if we had enough warning of such an event we, as a society, would devote all necessary resources to deflecting the incoming object.
On the other hand, “Climate Science” is unreliable, nearly incalculable and, because of zealots who have ulterior motives, has become completely political. They can’t prove what, if anything, has happened or is happening or tell us of its impacts with any reliability.
And when their methods of misinformation are shown to the world, they cry foul
Jean-Pascal van Ypersele, the vice-chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), said he believed the theft of the emails was not the work of amateur climate sceptics.
…..
Mr van Ypersele said the expose was making it more difficult to persuade the 192 countries going to Copenhagen of the need to cut carbon emissions.“One effect of this is to make scientists lose lots of time checking things. We are spending a lot of useless time discussing this rather than spending time preparing information for the negotiators,†he said.
If something is so important that the entire world will be effected, sensible folks would want scientists to “check things” (including and especially scientists that disagree) and discuss the best way to resolve the issue. That these bureaucrats just want some very binding and very detrimental laws passed RIGHT NOW!!1! is more than cause for suspicion of their motives.
To any and all leftists who want to scoff, think: Patriot Act.
Some folks just want to believe. In anything. So long as humans are at fault.
(second link found at CCinZ)