Tuesday, May 7, 2019

"All global warming predictions are computer based monkey business"


     I laid out the letter below and then went to meet a friend for lunch at Taco Diablo, one of my favorite eateries in Evanston.  Walking to my car, I noticed this mural by Shawn Bullen along the 'L' line, just south of Davis Street. I assumed it had to be brand new—I'm on that stretch of street fairly frequently. 
     No, put up in 2017; I just never noticed it before.
     Typical. There's a lot of that going around. Thinking about how I missed it, it occurred to me that the Internet favors the ugly, the crazed, the extreme. Human nature perhaps. We see, and remark upon, the hostile, menacing stuff—the echo of natural selection, some vestigial protective trait, no doubt—and tend to overlook the beautiful.
     So I thought I would pair these images—which certainly speak to our precious natural world—as a balm, with the letter, which is actually not as crazed as it first seems. Climate scientists I spoke to on my trip were also concerned that they can come off as too extreme, too shrill, predicting disasters that don't come to be, or not for 100 years. Of course they don't have the sneering tone of this letter, the aggressive dismissal of anything that one does not already believe.
    We live in an age of contempt. Why argue when you can condemn? Why educate yourself when you can just express the venom that condemned you to a lifetime of ignorance in the first place? That's a whole lot easier. Yesterday's column on climate change of course was automatically rejected by the people who might benefit from it most. I think this letter can serve to represent them all. Notice how he rejects science in favor of something an old woman told him. I refrained from altering it in any way.

I have studied weather my whole life, any one can do better than a professional weather caster! I live in Palos Hills, home of ‘moraine valley’ carved out by glaciers 20,000 years ago, prior to us being here. No green house gasses by us yet. And yes, the glaciers receded back up north all by themselves, no help from us. I asked a 90 year old lady on vacation in Florida, if the ocean level has ever changed over the years, the beach line. Nope. Hmmm? Almost all you weather climate change dooms day people are very confused over global warming, and natural climate changes, that happen through out time, due to the wobble of the earth and our earth moving around. Dust bowl in mid west during 1800, lasted 50 years, no cars yet just cows farting! Climate change. Ice is forming still, new ice all over the artics, a lot of it. You see the ice falling into the oceans, global warming? A natural phenomenon. You did not see global warming. You can’t even write on paper how much water covers the earth, billions and trillions of gallons, 10 miles deep in the Atlantic trench. All the global warming predictions are computer based monkey business. There are far more scientists who debunk global warming that believe it. Look it up. It’s simply, weather changes. It will get warmer, and it will get colder by natural causes and us, a bitty. (Moraine Valley, natural ice age) who caused it, no body, we weren’t here. One natural volcano dumps more junk into the atmosphere than we can do in a lifetime. Now here comes the science for fools! The earth is alive and takes care of itself unless we don’t nuke it first (far worse fate to worry about). Hurricanes, typhoon, tornado, floods, torrential rainstorms, lightning, wind storms, waves, sand storms, the sun, hmmmm, all the ways our earth cleans itself up, all by itself. It keeps up well. Look at the car you drive after it rains next time, what are all the spots all over it, where did they come from, the earths washing machine on duty! Acid rain too. Don’t worry Neil, the earth is just fine! We get 6 hurricanes one year and crap our pants, oh they are so strong, and the next year we get two and forget? It gets so hot here, and we have the coldest winter on record in the Midwest, oh! There used to be tropic weather up in the arctic millions of years ago, fossils prove it oh my! How could that be? Let nature do its job, it is and will. The earth is 80% water, we only live on 20% of the land, most of earth is barren (deserts, jungles, wasteland). We are a pimple on the earth. I will re write you in 12 years when we all die as Cortez claims, probably an idol of yours,another mis informed taco waitress with a dangerous venu. Be careful those icebergs don’t float into your yard. Don hall




7 comments:

  1. I guess the letter could be taken for common sense, but common sense so often misleads us that we have to depend on experts to explain phenomena that contradict common sense. Unless, of course, we know it all instinctively or from direct communication with the Almighty.

    john

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  2. I wonder what your letter writer would have to say about this. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/06/climate/biodiversity-extinction-united-nations.html?smtyp=cur&smid=tw-nytimes

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  3. The most depressing aspect of that letter is that Don Hall has the same vote I do. It's the fundamental flaw of democracy, which may yet prove fatal.

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  4. My compliments to the 90 year old Florida woman patrolling the beach. Thank you for your service. In Miami Beach streets once dry now flood at high tide, she must have missed that. Yes, ice is being made somewhere on Earth constantly, while it is melting and evaporating elsewhere. You don't have to be a scientist to see that American continental glaciers are disappearing, as have the snows of Kilimanjaro. Greenland, summer Arctic Ocean ice decreasing as well. The dynamics of global forces will confirm and/or confound the scientists. The planets survival is not in question. Man is the fragile living thing and the increasing multitudes and our growing industrializations are the unknown factor in the equation. All predictions are just that. What I believe to be indisputable is that most measures to combat global warming are beneficial in the long run, while the most dire of predicted outcomes are too terrible to imagine. The religious believers like to ask atheists "what if you're wrong?" I would ask Don the same question.

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  5. Dear Don Hall: I have studied weather my whole life, anyone can study weather their whole life...even me. I have been a weather junkie since the early days of Harry Volkman and P.J Hoff the TV weatherman and cartoonist, who drew the politically incorrect "Little Ah Choo" that counted pollen grains with an abacus. I would have been a professional weather forecaster and aspired to a meteorology degree but I couldn't handle the required math. Asking a 90-year-old lady if the ocean level has ever changed over the years is absurd and ridiculous...ninety years isn't even a grain of sand on the beach when it comes to both recorded history and pre-history. Climate changes of the present are not caused by wobbles of the of the earth, nor are dust bowls due to cows farting. You can write on paper how much water covers the earth, but you would need a lot of room for all those zeroes. Not 10 miles deep in the Atlantic Trench, only a lousy seven...in the Pacific, off the Marianas. Computer-based monkey business is numerical data and weather statistics. Most of the warmest years in history have been since 1990. Look it up. Figures don't lie, but liars can figure. It’s not simply weather changes. It's us, spewing all that crap into the atmosphere.And if you get a natural volcano (are there any unnatural or man-made ones?) like Krakatoa, dumping ash on top of all the other junk, we are toast. The earth is alive and will take care of itself unless we kill it. Our ecosystem is very fragile, and even a washing machine will break if it is overloaded with too much. This was not the coldest winter on on record in the Midwest, even in my lifetime it has been worse...think Sixties, Seventies, and Eighties. Why is that no longer happening? Let nature do its job, and if you mess with it, it will kill off millions of species and then it will kill you and me. I have studied weather since I was twelve and I have a shelf of weather books. I am glad we cancel each other out. Grizz 65

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  6. "There are far more scientists who debunk global warming than believe it. Look it up." I did look it up and found compelling evidence of a consensus belief in human caused global warming among all scientists to be over 90 percent. For climatologists the figure is 97 percent.

    Tom

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  7. Wow. How depressing to think letter writers like that are walking around.

    But the mural is wonderful!

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