Tag: weather

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crime and punishment folly ideological culture

Cold Truth

One of the climatic shifts supposed to be happening to our traumatized planet is the melting of polar ice into huge puddles of slush, with maybe a few polar bears helplessly drifting on the dwindling ice floes of a rising sea.

The alleged calamities of various alleged major climatic changes are allegedly due solely to human civilization. We can render the latter doctrine more plausible if we ignore all the major variations of climate that transpired for millions of years before mankind and industrial civilization showed up.

Anyway, if polar ice were indeed melting away over the long term, we could argue about the causes and effects.

But it doesn’t seem to be happening.

According to research at the University of Copenhagen using photographs and satellite data, the glaciers of Antarctica have been pretty stable over the last 85 years or so. (The SciTechDaily article about the findings calls this stability an “Antarctic Anomaly.”)

With the help of modern computer technology and aerial photographs going back to 1937, the researchers managed to track how the glaciers of East Antarctica have changed over the decades.

They found that “the ice has not only remained stable but also grown slightly over the last 85 years, partly due to increased snowfall.… While some glaciers have thinned over shorter intermediate periods of 10 – 20 years, they have remained stable or grown slightly in the long term, indicating a system in balance.”

Uh oh.

Chicken Little never had it so tough.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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free trade & free markets national politics & policies too much government

Slow Murder Is Still Murder

weather, climate change, government, power

Electricity providers must not beg the government to destroy them more slowly. 

“I’m not saying now’s the time to double down” on fossil fuels, pleads Lanny Nickel, chief operating officer of Southwest Power Pool, which helps provide electricity to 14 states. “I’m just saying now’s the time to slow down on the removal of [those] assets from our footprint.”

The assets Nickel means are oil, gas, coal.

Like others in the business of keeping the lights on, Nickel knows that if and when the percentage of fossil fuels in the utility industry “footprint” is coercively reduced to point oh one percent or whatever, wind and sunshine will not be taking up the slack. 

We’ll suffer, instead, from lots more brownouts and blackouts.

Nickel understands this. 

But begging regulators and politicians to go slower won’t discourage them. They’ll just gloat about how they’re making the utility executives sweat.

We should in fact be doubling down on fossil fuels, because these are the only always-​reliable sources of electricity. 

Should solar and other sources of electricity become cheaper and more reliable, people won’t have to be compelled to increasingly turn to them. The transition would happen naturally, in the normal course of progress. 

And the notion that government will be able to fine-​tune global weather if only we are forcibly deprived of our means of coping with the ups and downs of the weather is a willful delusion.

Electricity providers must not beg the government to destroy them more slowly, sure. But more importantly, the government should not be destroying them — and us — in the name of the religion of Climate Change at all.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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folly nannyism national politics & policies

Doom Fails to Arrive on Schedule

DOOM

Doom is not always bad. I’d appreciate the doom of nonsensical doomsaying, for instance… although I doubt that that glorious day will dawn anytime soon.

Equally unlikely is an apology from ABC and Chris Cuomo for pitching, back in 2008, a muddled ABC special, “Earth 2100,” about all the disasters expected to arrive by 2015, among other years.

The idea? Forecast the harm inflicted by allegedly man-​made global warming and collateral calamities, via the scientific methodology of being safely vague or just making stuff up. One way the network secured data was to ask viewers to pretend they’re in the future and then “report back.” (Well, it was 2008, a more primitive era. They did things like this back then.)

Here’s a sample of what ABC purveyed as possibly impending:

  • “Temperatures have hit dangerous levels.” (Time for air conditioning and/​or heat!)
  • “We’ve got more people, less and less resources. That’s a recipe for disaster.” (Let markets be fully unfettered so we can be sure to get more and more instead!)
  • “It’s June 8, 2015. One carton of milk is $12.99.” (Unless that’s a big carton, no. Try $3 or $4 a gallon.)
  • “We’re going to see more floods, more droughts, more wildfires.” (Good work, Nostradamus!)

We still get storms. (Always had ’em; always will.) And inflationary Fed policy and other bad governance still swirl on the horizon. So let’s have shelter, fire departments, umbrellas, and market-​friendlier policies; and let’s not reside on hurricane-​prone beaches.

Thanks for the heads-​up, Chris.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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DOOM

 

Categories
national politics & policies

Ice Is Also Great

We all like talking about the weather, and one reason “global warming” theory caught on was not because of the science, but because it gives us a “just-so”-type scenario to spice up any conversation.

Here on the East Coast, we’ve endured one of the snowiest winters in years. Elsewhere, the winter’s been moderate.

Must be global warming!

The tendency to make every kind of weather a paradigm-​case instance of global warming has become something of a joke. We all know that “weather is not climate,” but we’ve also heard a lot of silliness about how this or that weather proves a coming global warming catastrophe.

Al Gore almost invented the technique.

Last week a quip — a “tweet” — from Senator Jim DeMint made the rounds. He wrote that “It’s going to keep snowing in DC until Al Gore cries ‘uncle.’”

Droll. But the truth remains that one cold snap does not a climate make. What counts for global climate depends on averages, highs, lows, medians, means, and all that.

Knowing this — and knowing that world climate has been much cooler than now as well as much warmer — still leaves me something of a skeptic about the notion that human civilization is the major factor.

Or that warming is altogether bad. An Ice Age, which scientists have been saying we’re overdue for, would be worse.

Brrr. Do I know!

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.