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Why Do They Pound the Table?
A brilliant post from last year wondered why Harrison Ford was so angry about science. Discussions of science are not generally emotional events and are often perceived as boring. Math is not thrilling – it’s just math – it adds up or it does not. There’s nothing to believe in. So there’s no reason to convince anyone of anything. But those who promote climate change very often attempt to use emotions rather than simple scientific explanation.
When I saw this picture of Greta Thunberg, I was reminded of that post, and of this quote from Carl Sandberg: “If the facts are against you, argue the law. If the law is against you, argue the facts. If the law and the facts are against you, pound the table and yell like hell.”
It doesn’t bother me that the climate change promoters are wrong. I’m often wrong. What bothers me is that they clearly know they’re wrong. But they want power, so they pound the table.
Al Gore and Leonardo DiCaprio do not live like people who think that carbon emissions are important. Harrison Ford and Ms. Thunberg do not speak like someone who has the facts on their side. These are not honest mistakes. Ms. Thunberg is not an innocent kid sharing her uninformed opinions. This is being done not with innocence, but with malice. It’s not foolish, it’s vicious. This is scary stuff.
Published in General
This appears to be the paper: https://www.pnas.org/content/116/17/8190
But there also is some other speculation that was presented outside the publication process, or so it has been claimed.
Seriously.
Feel Free to use it if You want.
The paper doesn’t claim that all the extinctions happened immediately after the event. There was a lot that happened very quickly, more than we may have been aware of before this study, but this is the way the paper puts it in its concluding sentences:
And it seems to make rather modest claims as to the effect of the glass beads, which were smaller the farther you get from the impact. At the Montana-North Dakota site they were about 1mm in size, some larger, some smaller. At that distance, most of them fell during the period from 15-120 minutes after the impact. They seem to have been ingested by some filter-feeding aquatic animals, but it’s not even clear that they were the cause of death of those organisms. I would imagine they didn’t do them any good, but there were enough other things going on to cause trauma and disruption to life over the short and longer term.
(I scanned the paper rather quickly, but it’s reasonably readable. There were a few terms and phrases that I wasn’t familiar with and didn’t bother to look up, so I hope I didn’t miss anything that would contradict what I wrote above.)
It occurs to me that by using the term “ingested” I may have been going beyond the published study and contributing to the claims made by some of the sensationalists. The paper remarked on the prevalence of beads that were caught in gills of fishes that feed on suspended particles. Those were beads that were not ingested, but they do cause a person to wonder about the effect of beads that may have been ingested.
Love that movie!
But my inspiration was actually Dave Chapelle’s bit about the white “Q” in booty shorts, hitchhiking until being picked up by his fellow “alphabet people,” and the regal Joseph Epstein’s line, quoting his friend, who, when honked at in Chicago traffic, rolls down his window and shouts: “blow it out your duffle bag, fart head!”
That sounds right. Thank you. Perfect. It is worth a listen. It was fascinating. :-)
“I wonder how far he’ll fly if I pop his suspenders.”
Great pix. “The Gambler” is a great song.
All last night I was worried that I had left a negative impression of my son-in-law and daughter in Vermont. I hope I did not. I could not ask for a better son-in-law. He is a wonderful father to his son (my perfect grandson) and husband to my daughter. He has good sense of humor, he’s really smart, and we are good friends. :-)
According to my flawless computer model the meteor hit at 7:35 on a Tuesday and the last dinosaur was pronounced dead at 10:57 the following morning and buried without autopsy due to recent staff reductions.
Huh. So you can fly there from Alderaan, California in five and a half hours give-or-take a parsec.
More evidence to support my theory that if people shut up more, I’d be happier.
I’m certain this is true.
Not going to happen.
Says the man with 100,000 comments on Ricochet…
A polar bear drowned, 251 birds dropped from the skies and 2.5 future hurricanes became inevitable because of the fossil fuels used to power the computers used to bring this denier thread into existence. St. Greta, pray for us.
I prove my point. 😜