CLIMATE CLIMATE

I was pondering the AGW conversation the other day and it hit me how odd it is that we are so worried about what is commonly referred to as climate change. It would seem to me that the real test of man's effect on the climate would be if he could keep it FROM changing. Now that would be truly incredible and much easier to prove man's involvement. We could argue that for many millennium our climate has been changing and now that man has arrived on the scene it is no longer changing. No more ice ages followed by periods of warming. Changes that the sun would have brought to our climate are being counter-acted by the by-products of man's existence. Cycles of warm and cold ocean currents are no longer measurable due to the many climatological changes we have brought to bear on this poor, impressionable, delicate cosmological flower we call Earth. Now that would be front page stuff. That should certainly be deemed "fit to print" by any self-respecting newspaper in the world. (if there are, indeed, some left). But no, we are treated on a daily basis with vague and ambiguous notions of how man has so negatively impacted his environment that we are doomed to destruction. If I may quote an old TV show here, "just the facts, ma'am." We cannot restrict our discussion to the facts because the facts do not decidedly point in the direction the ruling class would like to take us so we are left with seemingly intelligent people spewing what you could call propaganda except that the true propagandists would take exception to being lumped in with such a laughable community. It would seem their strongest argument is simple, "oh yea, well what if it's true?". That game becomes real interesting real fast and can quickly unravel even the strongest of societies. If we throw out 5 or 6 carefully chosen what-if's and then took particular action to counter- act those things which might occur we could quickly bring the world to an end even faster than if the what-if's turned out to be true. For today's research assignment please read the children's story of the Three Silly's. This will give you some insight as to the dangers of piecing together a string of what-if's.

As for climate change, the choice of words to frame this discussion should tell you something about the IQ's of those who are driving the fear-mongering. In case you didn't know, climate is change. The two words are all but interchangeable. It could just as accurately be called climate climate.

Full Disclosure

So then, inasmuch as a blog is sometimes superfluous I feel compelled on this day to entertain a subject that I usually avoid so as to keep as many friends as possible. So, while I have likely enjoyed having most of you as friends I will not hold you responsible if you feel led to terminate our relationship today. I just don't understand the amount of tolerance our society has for the consumption of alcoholic beverages. I understand that alcohol, like guns, does't kill people, people kill people. But if we treated alcohol like we do guns I would be happy. However, we don't. While it's been years since I made a study of the statistics surrounding our most beloved of killers, I think it's safe to say that alcohol is involved in, if not the primary cause of, the loss of far more innocent lives than guns and swimming pools combined. Smoking, on the other hand, endangers only the person sucking the smoke into their lungs. But really, do we want those nasty smells floating about our cities and homes. Heck, no. Let's ban them from society. Alcohol, on the other hand, gives us so many memorable events, from those lovely mass gatherings out by the river in high school to those foggy frat parties, and on to the ever popular vague impressions of striking those closest to us with the back of our hands, or worse. My mother was a heavy smoker but the cigarettes never influenced her to make rash decisions with tragic results. Those cigarettes never led to the break up of our home nor the financial ruin of spending all we had on her habit. I'm not aware of any car accidents resulting in the loss of life due to someone smoking while driving. Things like lake drownings, alcohol poisoning, sticking an arm in the fan blade of an engine while it's running, parking-lot fights, mattress fires from passing out with a lit cigarette in your hand, and untold public resources spent to offer assistance to those who were alcohol impaired come to mind. I know life offers lots of risks and accidents will happen for lots of reasons, but in my mind there is nothing we could do to more effectively improve our society than to try the whole prohibition thing again. The fact that we are so ready to legalize more drugs tells me what little understanding we have of the toll we are paying for the ones we already have.