By Mark C. Ross
Fear is a great motivator, but it comes with a catch. It tends to inhibit good decision-making. Demagogues love it because it works so well. Right now, the Northern Hemisphere is having serious heat waves in many locations. Oy, vey! But wait…let me look at this here calendar. Oh, gee — it’s the middle of August. Just a coincidence, I guess.
We used to learn in school that there were these things called ice ages. The last one, the Pleistocene, ended about 10,000 years ago, and it lasted only about 2.5 million years, give or take. At its peak, 30% of the Earth’s surface was covered with ice. The oceans were way lower, too.
The jury is still out on why ice ages happen and why they end. Back in the 1970s, it was established that the sun goes through a 22-year intensity cycle…sort of. The hockey stick guy, Michael Mann, wrote an article for Scientific American explaining that his bungled warming prediction was the result of forgetting to include the solar cycle in the data used for his computer model. I commented online that that was a pretty amateurish mistake for someone who gets paid to be a scientist. They then yanked my commenting privilege, thus demonstrating the corruption of science by politics. I didn’t renew my subscription after having one for 30 years, and they spent a bunch of money junk-mailing me to send them the next check.
There’s also this pesky thing called tectonics, in which the Earth’s land masses move around slowly, sometimes bumping into each other, causing large-scale buckling such as the Himalayas. One of the tip-offs for the establishment of this concept is the uncanny way that South America fits right into the west coast of Africa, just like a part of a giant jigsaw puzzle.
Somehow, it seems, change is now a bad thing, although it’s always been inevitable. Oh, yeah — there are the demagogues and engineered ignorance, courtesy of your local union-thug teachers.
“Atmospheric heat trapping” is scary stuff, right? If it didn’t happen, however, everything would freeze solid every night, just as it does on the dark side of the moon. How exactly does carbon dioxide trap heat? I’ve been told of some kind of molecular mumbo-jumbo, which doesn’t exactly add up. The warmest part of the spectrum is the infrared. And yet, sunsets and sunrises appear red because sunlight has the greatest distance to travel through the atmosphere to reach the observer. The other components of the spectrum are filtered out, leaving the red to penetrate the farthest.
Carbon dioxide is at about 0.04% concentration in the atmosphere. If you had a bottle that held 250,000 molecules of air, on average, only one of them would be CO2. About 70,000 would be oxygen. Yes, burning fossil fuels such as coal or gasoline releases CO2 into the atmosphere. But where did the carbon in the fossil fuels come from in the first place? (You’d better be sitting down for this.) It was extracted from the very same atmosphere by plants doing photosynthesis many years before. For plants to thrive, they need CO2 in the air and water around them. During that process, they produce oxygen, which I’ve been told can come in handy.
Nowadays, practically every newsworthy weather event is attributed by the corrupt media to human-caused climate change. At the end of 2004, Michael Crichton published State of Fear, in which he described this whole process of making ordinary weather appear to be an apocalyptic catastrophe. In his epilogue, he pointed out that a century before, eugenics was the sexy new fad that was sweeping the intelligentsia. Margaret Sanger and Adolf Hitler were two of the more prominent adherents of that hoax. Prior to that, phrenology was all the rage.
Civilization has no perfect immunity to goofball nonsense. But “herd” immunity is always within reach.