“Science Talk 1027 Climate Catastrophes: Past Present and
Future – The Earth has been warmer in the past and subject to abrupt events.
What can these tell us about likely future warming? Jonathan Cowie”
*sigh*
Pandering: “Pandering is the act of expressing one's views
in accordance with the likes of a group to which one is attempting to appeal.
The term is most notably associated with politics.”
Why isn’t the title of this talk “Climate Catastrophes: Past
Present and Future – The Earth warmer and colder in the past and subject to
abrupt events. What can these tell us about likely future warming and cooling?”
Because it’s not politically expedient to discuss global
cooling right now, even though in the state I live in, the effects of the last
glaciation period roughly 40,000 years ago are quite literally everywhere – I
walk on glacial moraine every time I step on undisturbed ground. I have gone
swimming and fished in an uncounted number of kettle lakes. Whenever I drive
along our main boulevard to the “shopping mall”, I pass through a glacially
sorted business that serves as a major source of pre-sorted gravel, sand, and
rock.
So excuse me for not getting hyped about global warming.
Global cooling is by far more disconcerting to me and my neighbors because the
end result is an integral part of our everyday lives.
It was also the raison
d’être (the thing that is most important to someone or something : the
reason for which a person or organization exists) that REAL LIVE SCIENTISTS in
the 1970s were all about ameliorating the effects of global cooling. Of course
those who are in power now insist that “this was never so!” (http://ossfoundation.us/projects/environment/global-warming/myths/global-cooling).
At the time the possibility of us cycling back to an ice age was a real fear.
At least the media made it appear as a real fear…
But REAL LIVE SCIENTISTS today are completely certain that
the “science is settled” and that there isn’t anything more that we can learn –
climatologists in 2015 are (paradoxically) the evolutionary peak of the
science. There’s no more to learn. The computer models are to be seen as
conclusive and irrefutable.
Today’s climate scientists with the inevitability of anthropogenic
global warming say with complete confidence and seriousness: “The industrial
imposed climate forcing is so large that we can not at this level of forcing,
return to an ice age.” End of discussion. There is a 99% consensus and anyone
who says anything else is a climate denier (“Journalists and newspaper columnists
including George Monbiot and Ellen Goodman, among others, have described
climate change denial as a form of denialism. Several commentators, including
Goodman, have also compared climate change denial with Holocaust denial.”) (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_change_denial)
It reminds me of my high school football team prancing
around the field after they won the conference championship and the crowd
chanting, “We’re number one! We’re number one!”
Scientists being certain about...anything makes me smile. By
intent, science is about change. Very few theories or even mathematical
constants, like the speed of light, survive for very long unchanged – even the “c” in E = mc2 , well-known as a “constant”
may not be...constant. https://www.sciencenews.org/article/speed-light-not-so-constant-after-all
Also, while climatologists blame the machinations of Big Oil
and public relations advertising and conspiracies for the lack of concern in
the US, Canada, and the UK, I wonder if any of them have considered the
possibility that the reason common folk mistrust them and their proclamations
is that in order to even GET a PhD, you have to be rich...and who trusts a rich
man? (One half of the current US Congress is made up of millionaires. *shrug* I
just have trouble believing that PhDs and millionaires care much about me with
my master’s degree in guidance counseling and my wife’s job as a classroom aide
in an elementary school or my daughter’s quest for a master’s degree in art
therapy or her boyfriend’s job in a company that creates and assembles high
quality photo albums for people...)
The upshot of all of my ranting above is that speculative
fiction writers are FAR MORE LIKE ME than those who clamor to take my cars and
house and comforts away in the name of “climate science”. I have no trouble
with accepting climate change – whether natural or accelerated a zillion times by
me driving to work, eating hamburgers, and forgetting to turn out my lights.
Let the arguing cease. Let the posturing of both sides who
wave their VERY EXPENSIVE and cash-sucking and fabulously fancy degrees in my
face cease and desist.
Let the normal science fiction folk – like me – begin to
offer me things I can actually DO to combat climate change. None of the PhDs
seem impressed that I recycle my aluminum cans, turn out my lights, replace
incandescent with LED bulbs, wash my clothes with cold water, and bike or walk
as often as I can. The message I get is that they *shrug*. Like old-fashioned
televangelists, snake-oil salesmen, and revival preachers in the Old West, they
clamor for me to believe THEM! When the public opinion polls show that “people”
don’t trust them, they clamor more loudly that I should believe THEM!!!
Let the Speculative Fiction establishment – represented by
the attendees of World Con and the people whose sessions they attend – eschew rhetoric
and powerpoint presentations and offer up some speculative solutions that DON’T
insist I pauper myself or that deliberately crisscross the planet to appear as Keynote
Global Warming Summit Speaker in (please don’t tell me this is “accidentally” a
lovely vacation destination…) Paris, France. Why Buenos Aires, Cancun, Milan,
Bali, and Paris?
Where are the ANSWERS speculative fiction folk? Gimme some futures I
can help achieve!
Program Book: http://www.loncon3.org/documents/ReadMe_LR.pdf
Resources: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quaternary_glaciationImage: http://myspot.mona.uwi.edu/physics/sites/default/files/physics/uploads/CC-WhatCanIDo.jpg
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