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So What?

Climate scientist Al Gore tells us that Artic Ice soon to vanish in summer. So what? Won’t that make shipping goods easier and have us consume less fossil fuels getting goods from East to West?

I love this quote at the end:

Jensen said the biggest ice sheets – Greenland and West Antarctica – were already contributing 1 millimeter (.04 inch) a year to those rising sea levels. She said this could double within the next decade.

OK, so let’s even QUADRUPLE it … if we quadruple this rise, we are talking about 0.16 inches of sea level rise per year. Over 100 years that looks like … 16 whole inches. If we can’t handle a foot and half sea level rise over the course of the next century, we really are doomed.

I’ll increase my drumbeat louder now. Tell me the economic impacts of your worst case scenarios. I want to see them in every article. Because if you track the IPCC reports from 1 ’till now, you will see that the expected economic damages from warming are decreasing with each report, even as the expected climate disruptions are larger. So what if there is less polar ice (ignoring why it is happening, forget that we are still emerging from an ice age 400 years ago, let’s just blame it all on us and move on already)? It won’t raise sea levels (it’s already in the sea). Will it kill humans? Make us sicker? Make it harder for people up there to live? Oh, we can talk about polar bears if you like too – so tell me exactly what is the threat to them too.

OK, time for me to be banned from polite society. Back to grading papers. Can you imagine the horrible things I am teaching my students? Like looking for evidence; thinking about costs and benefits; about looking for bootleggers when the Baptists are out preaching; like not abandoning your reason and freedom; like learning how to herd unicorns. The poor souls.

One Response to “So What?”

  1. Harry says:

    Without reading your previous post, I would like your read on the present effect of 387 parts per million, or double that, on what effect it might have. As a math person and a physicist. Of CO2, that is.

    I know about the theory: CO2 lets photons in but does not let radiation of other wavelengths out. But it simply is goofy to me to think that even 800 parts per million means much. And CO2 is measured where to yield 387 parts per million? In a laboaratory in Boston in the winter, or in a Kansas wheat field in the summer?

    It is not surprising that the folks at Penn State and England lost their data. The dog ate my lab, and even if I had it, you would be too stupid to understand its intricacies. The answer is 0.037 moles of barium, and if you don’t give me an A for my lab, my father the lawyer will sue you.

    While we are at it, before air travel, what was the temperature exactly 100 years ago in Amherst, and what was it in Hartford? Was it measured at noon on the south side of the kitchen at Psi U? Was that measurement accurate to one degree, plus or minus a degree, and what effect did that have on the growth of trees in Sharon, Connecticut, or the depth of the snow on Mont Blanc? Must have been because the concentration of CO2 was 450 parts per million in a lab in Cambridge.

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