Today, Newsweek ran an article harkening back to their 1970’s article on the impending doom of Global Cooling on our cultures and food supplies. As we all know, I’m not a big fan of climatologists as time and time again, along with environmentalist, they show how little they DO know about the way our world works by “fixing” elements of our environment only to instigate impending doom elsewhere. Sort of an environmental butterfly effect; fix one, break another.

So I thought I would post some snippets from the article and take a look at the world as “Newsweek” sees it.

NEWSWEEK published a small back-page article about a very different kind of disaster. Citing “ominous signs that the earth’s weather patterns have begun to change dramatically,” the magazine warned of an impending “drastic decline in food production.” Political disruptions stemming from food shortages could affect “just about every nation on earth.” Scientists urged governments to consider emergency action to head off the terrible threat of global cooling.

How did NEWSWEEK—or for that matter, Time magazine, which also ran a story on the subject in the mid-1970s—get things so wrong? In fact, the story wasn’t “wrong” in the journalistic sense of “inaccurate.”

Correct, it WAS inaccurate, as was the speculation that 2006 was to be a horrendous disaster ridden hurricane-fest.

As calculated by the mathematician Milutin Milankovitch in the 1920s, these factors (ice ages / warm cycles) vary on interlocking cycles of around 20,000, 40,000 and 100,000 years… but in any case, climatologists now are mostly agreed that human impacts will swamp the effects of the Milankovitch cycles.

Notice the use of the words “mostly agreed”. I hear this a LOT when I am discussing such things with my friends who do this sort of work for a living. With a few exceptions I hear things like “almost certain”, “mostly agree” etc. I NEVER hear “with 100% certainty”, “total agreement” etc.

Seems to me, that if you’re going to declare something a reality and ‘impending’ you would want something more than “almost certain”. I know that if I had the plague or some other life threatening disease that I would want something other than “maybe”.

In the mid-1970s, scientists were focusing on an increase of dust and “aerosols” (suspended droplets of liquid, mostly sulfuric acid) in the atmosphere. These, the result of increased agriculture and burning of coal in power plants, lower the Earth’s temperature by reflecting sunlight back into space.

Ironically, clean-air laws in North America and Europe had the effect of reducing aerosols (which cause acid rain), so the predominant influence on climate now is the buildup of carbon dioxide—which traps the Earth’s heat in the lower atmosphere and contributes to global warming

Seems to me that if it’s not one thing it’s another. Either we are doomed to freeze to death at our own hand, or we’re doomed to melt. Wouldn’t a balance of both keep us from getting too hot or too cold? (honest question)

Astronomers have been warning for decades that life on Earth could be wiped out by a collision with a giant meteorite; it hasn’t happened yet, but that doesn’t mean that journalists have been dupes or alarmists for reporting this news.

I will give them the benefit of the doubt, it wouldn’t HURT anyone to be more environmentally conscious, what I don’t like is the ego behind it all. If you ask the doomsday folks, man is nothing more than a blight on this planet. We have this idea in our heads that somehow we can manage the environment as if it was some obtuse business model capable of being micromanaged and departmentalized. Yet every time we have a huge driving force behind “cleaning” or “fixing” something we supposedly broke, about a decade later we find something else wrong and devastating that arose due to a previous fix. How about reducing our impact and dependency on non replenishable fuel sources and see how that goes for a bit. Stop trying to ‘govern’ the Earth, it will always bite you back.

Just look at the weather channel, you NEVER hear the weather man say “Ladies and gentlemen, get out your umbrellas if you’re going to be downtown today because it WILL rain for about 30 min. tomorrow around noon.” because he doesn’t know. He knows there’s a damned good chance that it COULD rain, but even if there’s a 70% chance of rain, it could never surface. They present you with a possible scenario and ask that you prepare for the following.

You can look at charts and graphs and databases all year long until your face turns blue but you simply CANNOT tell me what is going to happen to my climate in 30 years if I keep driving my F-350 Harley Davidson Edition… but you can speculate as to what “might” happen and you can be “almost certain” your data is correct.