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Climate Common Sense
What are the facts about climate change? Well, that depends on whom you ask. Meteorologists are not in total agreement about next week’s weather, much less the 50-year forecast. Similarly, scientists were not in universal agreement on how to respond to the COVID pandemic. Remember how Drs. Anthony Fauci and Frances Collins vehemently disputed the Great Barrington Declaration?
Since scientists don’t agree, one admittedly simplistic option would be to consider your own personal common sense observations about the climate. In my personal 60-year experience, the southwest U.S. does seem warmer and drier than in my youth.
But has global warming made a change in the way you live your life? Maybe you run the air conditioner more in the summer. But has it changed your life? Does a warming planet feel like an existential threat to life on earth? What have we been told?
In 1989, the Associated Press reported that “A senior U.N. environmental official says entire nations could be wiped off the face of the Earth by rising sea levels if the global warming trend is not reversed by the year 2000.”
In January 2019, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) said, “the world is going to end in 12 years if we don’t address climate change.”
In a 2019 video, the science guy, engineer Bill Nye, takes a blow torch to ignite a globe and said, “…the planet is on f***ing fire.”
When addressing the UN in September 2019, 16-year-old climate activist Greta Thunberg said, “You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words. And yet I’m one of the lucky ones. People are suffering. People are dying. Entire ecosystems are collapsing. We are in the beginning of a mass extinction, and all you can talk about is money and fairy tales of eternal economic growth. How dare you!”
New research reveals that 71% of children aged 7-12 are afraid of climate change. I asked my 10-year-old grandson if his fifth-grade teacher talks about climate change. He responded, “Yes, all the time.” Fortunately, he is not guided by hysteria. Though rising temperatures are a valid concern, we can’t let the climate alarmists control the debate, nor can we let them dictate energy policy.
I’m not convinced that a two-degree temperature increase over the past 125 years is a direct cause of extreme weather. I don’t accept the claim that the Texas freeze of 2021, the December 2022 arctic blast that covered much of the Central and Eastern US, bringing the coldest Christmas Eve on record, and the January storms in California were caused by global warming.
Why did climate alarmists change their talking points from global warming to climate change?
According to the climate industrial complex, climate change encompasses global warming, but refers to the broader range of changes, including rising sea levels; shrinking mountain glaciers; and shifts in flower/plant blooming times. From their perch upon the moral high ground, they claim that every extreme weather event is the result of higher CO2 levels. It gives them license to garner the attention, money, and power they crave. But do higher CO2 levels and a warming planet result in more hurricanes, floods, and forest fires?
According to Steve Koonin, former Undersecretary for Science in the Obama Administration, and author of Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters, hurricane activity is no different than it was a century ago. He further states that floods have not increased across the globe over more than 70 years.
But aren’t forest fires now more prevalent and damaging? You’d think so, but have you heard about the Great Fire of 1910, otherwise known as the Big Burn? That year fire conditions became severe due to an extremely dry winter and spring in the Northwest US. A series of fires broke out in Idaho, Montana, and Washington due to careless campers, loggers, and homesteaders, cinders from coal-fired locomotives, and dry lightning. Hurricane-force winds exacerbated the inferno, and by August 21, more than 3 million acres of private and federal land and 7.5 billion board feet of timber had been destroyed. The fire claimed 86 lives, mostly firefighters. Rain and snow began falling on August 23, ending the threat.
If the earth is warming, we should be able to deal with that in a rational way without hysterical alarmism, without unduly frightening our school children, without threatening our ability to heat and cool our homes, and without spending vast sums of money on unproven political solutions.
Are wind and solar farms the answer considering their intermittent ability to produce electricity? In addition, they have an enormous environmental footprint and wreak havoc on birds, bats, insects, and land and sea animals. Not insignificantly, the minerals needed to build wind turbines and solar panels are mined in China, Africa, and South America, where minimal environmental protections exist.
Do you believe that massive government grants and income tax credits to finance plants for building electric cars and charging stations will save the planet? Do you think giving the affluent a $7,500 tax credit for buying expensive electric cars is a common sense use of taxpayer money when according to the US Energy Administration, fossil fuels are by far the largest source of energy for electricity generation?
To solve our energy and environmental problems, we don’t need climate hysteria. We need better technological solutions, better political solutions, and common sense.
Published in Environment
Is the bulge of water around the equator more prominent, draining water from the polar regions? This would be so if the Earth were spinning faster (and we would have shorter days, perhaps by only seconds; but someone would notice) or if the Moon were closer (some astronomer would surely notice this too). Got any data for Hawaii or Panama?
I think the Moon is slowly moving away. Something like a centimeter per year.
It has been trying do distance itself ever since Trump was elected.
I think it’s more likely due to plate tectonics. These measurements are all made with equipment on land. Of course. So if the land is moving up or down, the measured sea level will be down or up.
Consider cities like New Orleans or Bangkok that are on top of rapidly collapsing aquifers. Those measurements show a rising sea level that really isn’t.
Do explore NOAA’s Sea Level Trends. It’s a lot of fun. (For some twisted value of fun.)
Honolulu is 6 inches per century:
Panama City is 5-1/2 inches per century:
However, the Earth’s spin is slowing down, not speeding up.
I can’t remember the calculations, but a few hundred million years ago when dinosaurs roamed the Earth, the days were considerably shorter. The reason for earth’s spin slowing down is due to the very slight gravitational tug from the Moon which cause the planet to flex slightly as it rotates (the thing that drives tides). The friction from that flexing is what is slowing us down. The Moon being much smaller, is subject to even more flexing from its larger neighbor, and it has already slowed down its rotation to the point of stopping altogether.
Bishop Walsh was right. The Moon is retreating, not getting closer, at about an inch or so per year. They know this because a guy with a really long tape measure did the calculation.
I laugh at the concern over sea levels rising a few inches per century. Between 16,000 years ago and 8,000 years ago, long before mankind was worried about cattle farts, sea levels were rising at five feet per century. The good news is that it has slowed down so much! But do you hear anybody celebrating?
8,000 years ago, we hadn’t built major cities all over what is really continental shelf.
Technically, I think, we’re in an ice age now — but that’s what we’re used to.
BTW, as landmasses rebound, no longer held down by ice, the coasts of those landmasses will sometimes see what looks like sea level decline — like ice cubes popping up in your drink.
Also, if prevailing winds shift so that they are blowing away from the shore, instead of toward it, this will also look like sea level decline.
The astronauts left a reflector on the Moon, so scientists merely have to shoot a laser beam at it and carefully measure the round trip time.
N.B.: If the Moon had stopped rotating, we would see both sides, in the course of a month. Actually it’s rotating so slowly that it shows the same face to the Earth all the time.
I consider this proof of the existence of God.
Which leads to the misnomer of the “dark side of the Moon” which is false. The FAR side of the Moon, which cannot be seen from Earth, gets just as much sunlight as the near side; we just don’t see it happening. Of all the stupid mistakes made by Space: 1999, that was the first and the stupidest.
Human kind is indeed causing so many climate crises that it is rare to get thru even a few months without noticing at least one of them.
But these are not at all because of normal everyday human activities. (Sorry about that, Greta. But you can go back to running your electric hair dryer now.)
Instead they are manufactured crises created by several black op programs working in conjunction with one another.
The programs have been on going for decades.
Combining chem trail programs with microwaves for satellites can bring about massive rain fall which will cause floods.
Or in the reverse, these programs can cause a historic, atypical drought, like the one that has lasted some 11 years here in California.
It should be noted that tree ring counters looking into the history of Calif rainfalls cannot find another similar 11 yr drought no matter how far back they have gone. (I think as I type this they have already gone back 800 years.)
Meanwhile Bill Gates has been offering up a smokescreen for this operation. Over the past 6 years, he has eagerly put forth the idea that spraying an abundance of particulate matter into the atmosphere will “heal the planet.”
Yeah right. Maybe the same guy who is now apologizing for the damage done to school age kids who had to forego face-to-face education because of those “experts” that Gates helped to put in charge of our nation since Mar 2020 can now help heal the planet. Of course he has apologized regarding our school aged offspring, stating “Early on, we just did not have any real data on what lockdowns would do to kids.” But such a major goof has not stopped his insistence on how he remains an expert on climate as well as health.
Northern Calif where I live was once known for its ‘bald headed” sunny summer days. There was not a cloud in the sky for weeks. But then occasionally a real rain storm. Back in the 1860’s, there was one summer with such tremendous showers that areas near Thurston Lake were not farm-able due to floods.
Now some 150 years later, we have week after week of overcast weather. When a storm is predicted, invariably there are massive numbers of planes overhead and the 24 hours of “heavy rain” becomes 24 hours of mist.
How can anyone explain this photo, given that our only airport supports only the smallest of modern day aircraft? Plus all those flights originating in Sacramento, San Diego, Los Angeles, Oakland or San Francisco are always above 11,000 feet by the time they are over our county. And even during the busiest of airplane travel weeks, which would be Thanksgiving week or winter Christmas holiday weeks, nothing amounting to even 3% of this occurs.
Tidal locking is actually pretty common.
I blame Pink Floyd.
“Tidal locking” is the perfect term for that. I was mistaken to say that the Moon has stopped spinning altogether.
I can’t explain the photo because, first of all, I can’t even see it. Are those plumes from airplanes in the sky?
A Moon God, to be precise!
But seriously, tidal locking (a.k.a. gravitational locking) is a well-understood feature of celestial mechanics. There are several examples in the solar system, including Pluto and its moon, Charon. They go the Earth-Moon pair one better, because both worldlets are locked on each other.
Even more proof!
Thanks to all for your comments. I’m new to Ricochet and hope to write more on this and other topic as time permits.
The left can’t be trusted since as Dennis Prager says, “Truth is not a left-wing value”. They say they want to save the planet by banning fossil fuels. But in their typical disingenuous way, I believe their true goal is to destroy the white, God fearing, self-governing, meritocratic patriarchy, that we call western civilization.
There is too a dark side of the moon. That’s where they filmed all the fake moon landing footage, so they keep it dark now so you can’t see the evidence.
No in my magical county in Calif, we re given extra large and extra long pieces of chalk by which we can then alter the look of the sky above us in any way that we desire. (Jeesh And following such a reply, I guess I should mention I am being snarky.)