Global warming thrives on short memories. Remember the 1970s? A blink of the eye in our own past, and a mere spec on the historical record. It was global cooling then, the great lakes were at high tide, beaches disappearing, shoreline homes falling into the water (with dramatic clips on the evening news). Life as we then knew was predictated to come to an end in another ice age.
Blink. Oh! Now the weather pendulum has swung and Chicken Littles who suck at the jive job tit of government salaries and/or grants to prepetuate their newly discovered and carfully cultivated self importance have declared that by "consensus" we are having a warm spell, or are we? It was record cold here in Northern IL the end of November and continues to be below normal, snow, sleet and ice nothwithstanding. It's 29 degrees and raining today, a real mess, but not unprecedented. And when our local weather wizzard gets on the tube the high and low records are for all to see, but one might ask: How far back? and How accurate are these records?
At first consensus the hurricanes were supposed to diminish because the warming narrowed the disparity of temperatures thought to generate the circular motion. But then we had a couple above average tropical storm years (2004 & 2005) so the story got reversed; this year we had no hurricanes so the forcasters are laying low.
And here's something: The benchmarks the forcasters were using were faulty in so far as back before the advent of wireless, storms that did not reach shore were not reported by ships at sea to become part the data base. Today every tropical wave that never matures to circular motion (much less a named storm)is part of the overall equation and a eye-rollin' topic on the evening news. Once actual scientific method was applied to the helter-skelter data base, adjusting for historic differences in reporting, Viola! Hurricanes are actually below historic norms, which either means the original guess about global warming diminishing them was right or, maybe, that the pundits know not what they profess to know.
Next time you hear some Jive-job talking head or Al Gore lecturing about how it used to be, consider the state of the art a short 131 years ago. Nobody but the Indians knew how many of them were in the Valley of the Little Big Horn River in 1876, but today's experts will tell you the temperature then and for hundreds of years prior. Some people believed the alarmists 35 years ago and feared the cold, now it's the heat that's gonna get us...if the sky doesn't fall first. So remember the prefatorial buzz word that hedges the bet of today's Chicken Littles: "consensus." Scientists and physicists do not attach similiar caveats to to demonstratible facts: Newton will always take the apple on the noggin, hence the Law of Gravity, and the earth is round by observation, not interpetation or consensus; water boils at 212 degrees f. at sea level barom. 29.92 every time.
So what can we do to capitalize on the paranoia by consensus? I for one really like the Wilbur Beans at Famous Dave's rib restaurant. But the carbon footprint! The methane! You know, the earth is going to hell in a hand basket because of cow farts. And I feel like I'm running up carbon emissions as fast as Al Gore's electric bill and jet set global hob-nobbing. He may have the franchise on buying indulgences by way of tree planting, so I'm thinking of selling carbon credits on eBay. For a price I will abstain from Wilbur Beans for a defined period of time. The winning bidder can dispose of his dirty old money through PayPal, feel better about himself saving the planet; I'll eat at the IHOP rather than Famous Daves, and my wife will really appreciate the diminished flatulance around the house. Win, Win, Win situation. No more drowning polar bears on my conscience. EDM
