Fighting The Fourth Reich

[Bob Butler 54]

Hmm… The solar cycles… you ought not to bet your planet on that. They have about a dozen year cycle, which means a lot of the heat records are broken when the cycles hit their warmest. Thus, you get alarmists and denialists taking turns blowing trumpets. At the low, everything returns to the same baseline. You do get some variation, but if you look at the overall curves there is a much longer term and larger magnitude trend. CO2 and temperature have been going up since serious fossil fuel use took off after the US Civil War. The last solar cycle peak was indeed lower than most, but the high temperature records came anyway.

The Northwest Passage isn’t a daydream. I remember bumping into a article about a commercial cargo ship that made it though without an icebreaker escort. I’m a bit dubious. Her navigator flew drones to help pick a course and the ship had a reinforced ice breaking bow herself. I went to find that article again, but got swamped in Google by too many pieces pushing northwest passage tourist trips to the far north. I also hear how Alaska, one of the more active states in preventing over fishing, has put a ban on fishing new areas opened up by retreating ice.

You can find individual articles saying odd things. If your perspective is partisan enough, you can convince yourself that the outlier article is representative. For that reason I generally don’t put too much weight on individual articles. Too many sponsors in the commercial press. Too many agendas. Does it make RealClimate and other places where the pros get together?

I think you want to review extinctions. Species don’t vanish slowly and steadily. Large clumps of them go together at the end of an epoch. Sometimes the reason is absurdly obvious. When a large enough asteroid hits the planet, you get an end of epoch with mass extinctions. Currently, the Earth is trying to respond to human dominance and often fails if extinction is counted as a failure. We’ve had a jump in extinctions already, and not all of them are directly climate related.

Scientific American covers one area in Amphibians in U.S. Declining at "Alarming and Rapid Rate"

Too much isn’t about science, but competing political memes. Reagan suggested government is the problem, that one should cut back on domestic spending. In FDR’s time, it was assumed big government solved big problems with big projects. Thus, partisans to varying degrees who have bought into these memes will pick and choose what they want to believe to confirm them. It is still possible to find enough denialist leaning articles to maintain the conservative belief. I suspect that won’t be the case indefinitely.

You predict a rural victory in a pending civil war. I referenced history in the Whig talk that has the urban - progressive - new technology faction generally coming out on top. Part of this is the adaptation of new ideas. The cities are generally the place where the new ideas impact most. The rural faction often attempts to hold onto yesterday. Generally, it doesn’t happen. There is a long slow struggle, yes, but in many suspect a full scale S&H crisis is about adapting the culture to new ideas and technology. Often, a conservative's cold dead body is involved. We're just learning different things from history, I guess.

I can sympathize with fracking being at best a bridge, but still wonder how much it would take, how close to disaster we get, waiting for a wide spread acceptance of nuclear. That’s one I want to watch. So far, fracking is being pushed, while reactor building is still mostly on hold. Should it be that way? Another question entirely.

Internet censorship? I know governments are playing that game. China has it’s great firewall. The US is pursuing jihadists on line. I don’t see the main stream media playing that game. There is no lack of partisans yelling at each other.