Curtis Dahlgren
The packaging and marketing of global warming "Science" (funny)
By Curtis Dahlgren
"Only 73 percent of U.S. adults were able to answer correctly that the earth revolves around the sun." – National Science Board (2010)
TOO MANY "FLAT-EARTHERS"? If the above stat is any more reliable than the usual ones, it may be a paradox – ignorance may work to the advantage of the global warming promoters in their attempt to scare the daylights out of little children and gullible adults. Originally I was planning to post a revue of National Geographic's September cover story, "Rising Seas; how they are changing our coastlines." Then I received the new issue of "grow" from the U.W. College of Ag and Life Sciences.
I call it the "cheese and whine" issue. The U. of Wisconsin is proud of its ability to sell mozzarella, but sort of whining about the difficulty of communicating with the science illiterates in the hinterlands regarding such issues as climate change or genetically modified food. I don't have an opinion on the latter except to say that the term sounds something like Bovine Growth Hormone as P.R. problems go. Higher Education has even bigger problems: a looming financial and credibility bubble.
Two ag communications professors are working on education for science professors re interaction with the peasants (whose attitudes are "rooted in religion and politics"). The New Media is a problem for them too, with its "often rude" and biased commentators. Academia blames illiteracy on schools and parents (although their Schools of Education trained the teachers and taught those parents!). I wonder how they expect to control the sea levels and the planet's temperature in the year 2525 if they can't even train today's teachers?
The world has bigger and more immediate crises than the polar caps – especially since there hasn't been any warming in about ten years, and the Arctic Ocean is very well frozen already this year! If skepticism and/or apathy on the subject is a problem, my advice to the scientific community is: stop making outlandish claims.
National Geographic says that if this one glacier breaks lose in Antarctica, it would raise sea level nearly ten feet. Well excuse me, but I don't believe that for a nano-second. A world without ice would have sea levels as much as 216 feet higher than it is today? Who did the math? I'd like to see names and faces. One expert says that "no matter how much we reduce our greenhouse emissions," we're already locked in to "at least several feet of sea-level rise, and perhaps several dozens of feet."
As I'm going to say in a letter to the Nat. Geographic, "If all you really want is cleaner air, just SAY so – instead of fudging statistics and making phony videos about a Noatian Flood coming (I thought they didn't believe in such stuff anyway). As a young arborist in the 1970s, I joined Friends of the Earth, thinking about clean air. I cancelled my membership after reading only one issue of their publication, because it was all socialism. When I complained, the editor said I probably wouldn't have enjoyed it anyway because "most ecologists are socialists" [probably socialists first, I thought].
NG magazine says that the seas were once 65 feet higher at a time when there were no cars, trucks, or coal plants. By the way, I remember 80 degree below zero wind chills in the early 1980s, so I sure am glad that we have warmed up a tad (whether the earth is warming or cooling depends on what year you compare with as of today). And they promised us that the oceans would stop rising in 2008, didn't they?
I wrote a column entitled "Has science ever been totally apolitical?" and the answer is no. For that one I was called a LOON (haha). That doesn't hurt my feelings; even loons needed Intelligent Design.
Anyway, a moderator at Scientific American said, "I find myself deleting many comments when I moderate. Maybe that's how it should be – commenting as a privilege, not a right."
The Academic "commune" has gone from 50 shades of grey (absolutely no absolute Truth) to "shades of East Germany." Two schools of thought, the "rest of the story"? We can't have that anymore; that would almost be sifting and winnowing – and that's so 19th century! A little sarcasm there, but it's not funny anymore.
CONCLUSION
"An educated person is one who has learned that information almost always turns out to be at best incomplete and very often false, misleading, fictitious, mendacious – just dead wrong." www.renewamerica.com/columns/dahlgren/130829
Today's "best and brightest" at our "elite" universities tell us we can have our own opinions but not our own facts. They will give us those!
Mark Twain said that "education consists mainly of what we have unlearned," and the science of climatology is still in its infancy. There is so much we don't know about cloud cover, water vapor, and the Gaia Hypothesis (public TV used to hype the fact that the earth has built-in defenses and self-regulatory abilities). The U.N. says that the current "pause" in warming is due to the emissions-effects being stored in deep waters such as the Pacific.
I say that if the planet never warmed, too much of our fresh water ("given enough time") would become tied up as ice and snow at high altitudes (do you have any idea how cold it is up there?). A British "geochemist" says that the earth was completely ice free 50 million years ago? Thank God for today's mountains!
Much of what we thought was 'known' will someday be UN-learned. It always IS! When a "glaciologist" or a "climate morphologist" makes an outrageous promise about the "next century," they are assuming mankind will survive THIS century! You'd better hope we make it past 2020 without a nuclear winter. And war has always been the worst polluter.
P.S. I'll leave you with that thought. We do have bigger things to do than pardoning turkeys!
© Curtis Dahlgren
December 2, 2013
"Only 73 percent of U.S. adults were able to answer correctly that the earth revolves around the sun." – National Science Board (2010)
TOO MANY "FLAT-EARTHERS"? If the above stat is any more reliable than the usual ones, it may be a paradox – ignorance may work to the advantage of the global warming promoters in their attempt to scare the daylights out of little children and gullible adults. Originally I was planning to post a revue of National Geographic's September cover story, "Rising Seas; how they are changing our coastlines." Then I received the new issue of "grow" from the U.W. College of Ag and Life Sciences.
I call it the "cheese and whine" issue. The U. of Wisconsin is proud of its ability to sell mozzarella, but sort of whining about the difficulty of communicating with the science illiterates in the hinterlands regarding such issues as climate change or genetically modified food. I don't have an opinion on the latter except to say that the term sounds something like Bovine Growth Hormone as P.R. problems go. Higher Education has even bigger problems: a looming financial and credibility bubble.
Two ag communications professors are working on education for science professors re interaction with the peasants (whose attitudes are "rooted in religion and politics"). The New Media is a problem for them too, with its "often rude" and biased commentators. Academia blames illiteracy on schools and parents (although their Schools of Education trained the teachers and taught those parents!). I wonder how they expect to control the sea levels and the planet's temperature in the year 2525 if they can't even train today's teachers?
The world has bigger and more immediate crises than the polar caps – especially since there hasn't been any warming in about ten years, and the Arctic Ocean is very well frozen already this year! If skepticism and/or apathy on the subject is a problem, my advice to the scientific community is: stop making outlandish claims.
National Geographic says that if this one glacier breaks lose in Antarctica, it would raise sea level nearly ten feet. Well excuse me, but I don't believe that for a nano-second. A world without ice would have sea levels as much as 216 feet higher than it is today? Who did the math? I'd like to see names and faces. One expert says that "no matter how much we reduce our greenhouse emissions," we're already locked in to "at least several feet of sea-level rise, and perhaps several dozens of feet."
As I'm going to say in a letter to the Nat. Geographic, "If all you really want is cleaner air, just SAY so – instead of fudging statistics and making phony videos about a Noatian Flood coming (I thought they didn't believe in such stuff anyway). As a young arborist in the 1970s, I joined Friends of the Earth, thinking about clean air. I cancelled my membership after reading only one issue of their publication, because it was all socialism. When I complained, the editor said I probably wouldn't have enjoyed it anyway because "most ecologists are socialists" [probably socialists first, I thought].
NG magazine says that the seas were once 65 feet higher at a time when there were no cars, trucks, or coal plants. By the way, I remember 80 degree below zero wind chills in the early 1980s, so I sure am glad that we have warmed up a tad (whether the earth is warming or cooling depends on what year you compare with as of today). And they promised us that the oceans would stop rising in 2008, didn't they?
I wrote a column entitled "Has science ever been totally apolitical?" and the answer is no. For that one I was called a LOON (haha). That doesn't hurt my feelings; even loons needed Intelligent Design.
Anyway, a moderator at Scientific American said, "I find myself deleting many comments when I moderate. Maybe that's how it should be – commenting as a privilege, not a right."
The Academic "commune" has gone from 50 shades of grey (absolutely no absolute Truth) to "shades of East Germany." Two schools of thought, the "rest of the story"? We can't have that anymore; that would almost be sifting and winnowing – and that's so 19th century! A little sarcasm there, but it's not funny anymore.
CONCLUSION
"An educated person is one who has learned that information almost always turns out to be at best incomplete and very often false, misleading, fictitious, mendacious – just dead wrong." www.renewamerica.com/columns/dahlgren/130829
Today's "best and brightest" at our "elite" universities tell us we can have our own opinions but not our own facts. They will give us those!
Mark Twain said that "education consists mainly of what we have unlearned," and the science of climatology is still in its infancy. There is so much we don't know about cloud cover, water vapor, and the Gaia Hypothesis (public TV used to hype the fact that the earth has built-in defenses and self-regulatory abilities). The U.N. says that the current "pause" in warming is due to the emissions-effects being stored in deep waters such as the Pacific.
I say that if the planet never warmed, too much of our fresh water ("given enough time") would become tied up as ice and snow at high altitudes (do you have any idea how cold it is up there?). A British "geochemist" says that the earth was completely ice free 50 million years ago? Thank God for today's mountains!
Much of what we thought was 'known' will someday be UN-learned. It always IS! When a "glaciologist" or a "climate morphologist" makes an outrageous promise about the "next century," they are assuming mankind will survive THIS century! You'd better hope we make it past 2020 without a nuclear winter. And war has always been the worst polluter.
P.S. I'll leave you with that thought. We do have bigger things to do than pardoning turkeys!
© Curtis Dahlgren
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