“USE YOUR MINDS”
December 9, 2018
Dear Friends and Colleagues:
Here I go again – I can’t help myself. Idiocy is gaining traction and I (we) should not sit still for it.
I’m referring to the new darling of the left – the increasingly loud, but woefully under-educated Representative-elect Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY). She is calling for the new House to establish a select committee for a “Green New Deal” whose goals would include 100% of national electric power coming from ‘renewable’ sources and a spanking new ‘smart’ electric grid within ten years. Of course, the usual cohort of the science-knowledge-challenged and mathematics-ignorant have climbed on board her GND train.
What’s wrong with this idea is its underlying premise — that our climate is being damaged by miniscule increases in a minor greenhouse gas — while simultaneously ignoring the major players in our planet’s weather and its climate, over time. The theory – and that is all it is – is supported not by actual data such as readings of temperatures in the atmosphere around the world, but rather, rests entirely on the products of large computer models that rest on major guesses about the most important natural phenomena that affect earth’s climate.
Here is the rub! No person or group of people can ‘model’ chaos! And the weather/climate system of our lovely planet is chaotic – constantly in flux – billions of tons of gases and liquids, moving, lifting up, diving down, sliding beneath, rising above, mixing, seeking equilibrium. The sun’s energy levels vary, our planet’s orbit varies and the earth wobbles on its axis. The earth even shifts its magnetic field! Oceans are both very cold and fairly warm and they move with great force to churn and mix – and they greatly affect air temperatures as they do so. Cosmic rays from ancient exploding supernovas continually shower our earth, but in varying intensities, and cosmic rays affect cloud formation. In turn, cloud formations reflect heat from the sun to outer space, thus cooling the earth, and at the same time they can trap residual warmth from the sun near the surface. We also know that our wonderful sun has unpredictable cycles of greater and lesser energy (warming radiation).
We also know that carbon dioxide comprises a mere four one-hundredths of one percent of our atmosphere and that when atmospheric carbon levels fall below two point two one hundredths of one percent, plant life – which sustains all life on earth – withers and dies.
Now, somehow, we are to mortgage our present and future because a complicated but unworthy, and untested, set of models with enormous gaps into which guessed-upon numerical values are plugged, purporting to represent the collective chaos of the enormously powerful forces of nature that have the greatest effects on our weather, come up with a range of increases in temperatures and sea level. So, you want to believe such baloney?
Geology (and written history) tell us that climate cycles have always affected our planet, from ice ages to ice-free polar regions, where palm trees thrived and from periods of torrential rains to prolonged droughts — and all of these things occurred without mankind’s involvement or any changes in the chemistry of our atmosphere.
And finally, the folly of such nonsense is that somehow, wind and solar can miraculously remain steady and keep the electricity on 24/7/365. Those technologies are very expensive and at the same time very unreliable. There is an enormous amount of ‘Big Brotherism’ associated with a Green New Deal scheme, and maybe that’s why socialists like Congressperson-elect Ocasio-Cortez are so enamored of it. Don’t buy it! Resist! Use your minds. Inform your kids and grandkids.
Old Frank