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Quote of the Day – Climate Change
The most extreme examples of climate change were the ice ages and they were really a catastrophe for life in many parts of the world. And we don’t understand them.
We just don’t know why they started or why they come and go in a more or less periodic fashion. It’s all a big mystery. And if we don’t understand ice ages we don’t understand climate. – Freeman Dyson
The California wildfires are sparking yet another round of claims that a natural phenomena, in this case wildfires, is being caused by climate change. It is more likely caused by poor land management, the permitting the accumulation of brush in chaparral country, but who cares? Nor is this a new problem. John McPhee, spent one-third of his 1989 book The Control of Nature discussing Los Angeles’s struggle with these types of wildfires. Back then folks were worrying that man was going to trigger a new ice age rather than runaway heating.
To paraphrase Thomas Sowell’s quote about racism, climate change is like ketchup; it can be poured over practically anything – and demanding evidence makes you a climate change denier.
What climate change does demonstrate is the pernicious effect of government funding on basic science. The results end up mirroring the desires of those holding the purse strings, because only people producing the desired results get funded whether they are motivated by being true believers or because they wish to retain their rice bowls. The age of science is being supplanted by the age of government-funded superstition.
Published in General
We know to be suspicious if research suggesting that smoking is harmless happens to be funded by tobacco companies, or if research on the health benefits of tea happens to be funded by tea companies.
Of course, we can still evaluate the research by objective measures and it may turn out ok.
Research supporting global warming theory may also be very good, but we really should have a bit of suspicion when pro-big government research is funded by government grants.
This is a candidate for scandal of the century.
A quote within a Quote of the Day – and even from Thomas Sowell!
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What do we know with any certainty about the cause of these devastating fires?
Attributing this to “climate change” is a way to both a) blame humans (by implication of the widely accepted definition of the term), and b) abdicate any responsibility of the people living, voting, and governing California. Typical lefty incoherence.
They accuse religious believers of being irrational and then espouse the completely irrational religion of AGW.
These two articles seem appropriate for this discussion.
https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/news/environment/sd-me-climate-study-error-20181113-story.html
*cough*(ocean temperature measurements… gross errors in calculations… got by peer reviews anyway)*cough*
and
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-6384457/Lack-sunspots-bring-Space-Age-record-cold-weather-NASA-scientist-warns.html
The scientists I work with, for the most part, try to keep mum and just “present the data”, but they do not deny that there is pressure to not rock the funding apple cart….
That is a wonderful quote – and the McPhee book with its great double meaning title is well worth reading. As he describes, the next phase of the California disaster will be the mud slides brought by the rains on unprotected hillsides.
I think I have mentioned the “Watts Up with That” (https://wattsupwiththat.com/ ) site before. It is a good pointer to lots of information about Climate. The man behind the site is Anthony Watt who is a professional weatherman and lives fairly close to the “Camp” Fire. The site has several links to analysis of any relationship between climate and the current fires. The best correlation seems to be to the point where logging was stopped to protect the Spotted Owl.
A few weeks ago, I read the book “The Whole Story of Climate: What Science reveals about the Nature of Endless Change” bu E. Kirsten Peters, who is a geologist. The book examines the geologic evidence for Climate over the millennia. What is a surprise is how quickly major changes have taken place. Often in 20 or 30 years, certainly within a human lifespan. It was a great book that really made you think about “The Control of Nature”
Gov. Jerry Brown vetoed a “wildfire management bill” in 2016:
http://www.latimes.com/socal/daily-pilot/news/tn-dpt-me-lb-utility-undergrounding-20160927-story.html
Addendum: It looks like it was really a bill to put utility lines underground. I dunno if the most recent wildfires were started by utility lines.
https://moorlach.cssrc.us/content/senate-bill-1463-electrical-lines-mitigation
Climate science bias in a nutshell:
Consider two scenarios: (A) a guy approaches an attractive woman in a bar and tells her he is essentially a physics nerd who studies long term weather patterns by trying to find ways to model chaotic systems and also develop proxies for temperature in past eras; (B) another guy approaches the same woman in the same bar and tells her he is doing cutting edge research to save the planet and that his work is cited by the UN and members of Congress in the overall effort to act before it’s too late.
Questions: Which guy is more likely to get lucky? Which guy is more likely to get funded? Duh.
Depends on how long she expects the relationship to last. The first can lead to a long and happy marriage, the second will only be entertaining in the short run.
Energy is a $10 Trillion/year business and affects every human on the planet. Control it and you control *everything* and *everyone*.
Ike said it best back in 1961:
This is the greatest hoax ever perpetuated upon humanity.
That is the current belief – a spark from a power line is thought to have started these fires.
This is the analogue to Ike’s “military industrial complex” which is virtually never cited, and is at least as relevant to our current woes.
I imagine the golden hills of California have been burning off and on since Pangaea.
At least the Camp fire was likely caused by this, the other fires burning in the state, likely have other causes that I have not seen.
I had a slight personal interest in the Camp fire, because my parents retired to a home on the upper ridge above Paradise, and lived there until they passed in 1998. The spot where they lived appears to be about 1/4 mile outside the fire area where structures burned, (according to detail Butte County incident maps as of 11/12/2018) showing where structures burned.
The area was heavily forested, and local logging was essentially stopped or at least made uneconomic by Government permitting changes in the 1990s. Claims of climate change are not justified by the evidence. Droughts of similar (and much longer) durations have happened in the state from the scientific studies of prior climate. The overall state climate is semi-arid, and even northern California is subject to periodic droughts. The longest I experienced when I lived there (In CA) was in the 1980s and it was worse than the current one.
The global warming folks don’t make their case as convincingly as their critics, it’s not even close, so the interesting thing is the political, cultural impact the warmers have. It’s like everything else coming from the what we call the left and it’s scary. They’re winning because expressing the truth can be costly while going along with the cultural mob is either harmless or rewarding. Marxists would call it the correlation of forces and if not vigorously opposed they win.
“Our error margins are too big now to really weigh in on the precise amount of warming that’s going on in the ocean,” Keeling said. “We really muffed the error margins.”
Well, no kidding, muffy.
Confirmation bias. If you got the outcome you were expecting, you don’t look real hard like at the underlying numbers and assumptions.
Why is it that “scientists” always seem to pick these almost perfectly rounded off numbers when they set targets?
Why not 23.5? 19.7? If they’re so knowledgeable and confident in the number, why is it always a 10%, 20%, 30%? These scienticians are supposed to be good at math, right?
This type of grid improvement effort is common, but for areas where fire is a higher probability, vegetation management is a critical piece in fire reduction.
For a comparison, in the east/northeast, vegetation management is something commonly paid for in your utility rates, but often used to pare back over-hanging limbs, that tend to break during hurricanes, snow weight, and ice storms.
Same idea, but used to mitigate the possibility of ignition near electrical equipment.
Only slightly apropos, but California just passed Measure W which raises bond money for water management.
Well, ok, but we’ve been paying taxes all along for water management and we tax all the newcomers for it too.
So where’s the water management we’ve already paid for? It might be time to dig up some dead politicians and re-embalm them with tar and feathers.