Climate Gate and the new adventures of an old argument
Well, I’m sure you’ve heard by now about Climategate. A hacker broke into a database and several email accounts for some climatologists and revealed some interesting stuff. Does it mean anything? Does it matter? What is really going on with our climate?
I think if anything all this data means is we don’t know exactly what is going on. Does the climate change, getting hotter and colder? Yes! We KNOW beyond a shadow of a doubt that the Earth was once covered with Ice. We know beyond a shadow of a doubt that it was once hotter than it is now. So, nailed it, give me a fruit smoothie and I’m off to eat Chinese food.
Is it really that simple? Is anything? No. Of course not. How silly of you. It’s true we are using oil and coal and they do have some negative impacts. Oil spills are generally considered to be a bad thing, even by Oil tycoons. Coal, well, need I say more than simply ‘coal..”? Dan Aykroyd once lived in a mansion that sat on top of an underground burning coal field, poor nose-less guy. Not to mention the countless numbers of good men that have either died or suffered miner’s cough and other ailments from working in them.
Ok, so, bottom line, coal and oil are bad, mmkay. And, they have this pesky problem of being exhaustible. Meaning, we’re going to use them all up one day. Going to happen, no doubt about it, period, end of story.
So, my point here is, do we really care about Climategate? Shouldn’t we explicitly not care? Why do we need a bunch of scientists to come up with a reason why using coal and oil is bad when we know it’s bad for other reasons? The obvious answer is money of course. Economies are based on oil. Can’t just stop using it at the drop of a hat.
My point here is, world, lighten the hell up. Climategate or no climategate, the climate of the Earth is going to change because, well, that’s just what it does. It changes. There was a mini-ice age in the middle ages. It happens. It’ll happen again. Are we speeding it up? Maybe, but clearly not so fast that it’s changing in the next five or ten years. And guess what, in the next fifty, when China and India add another billion or so people to the middle class, the oil consumption rate is going to go through the roof, which of course will use up all the oil, causing economic turmoil, mass starvation, dogs and cats living together, you get the drift.
What Climategate is going to do is turn attention away from actual science, actual thinking, and turn it towards bickering, side taking and basically time wasting. And then Keanu Reeves will show up in a big ball of light space ship and have little metal insects eat you. Gross. Who would want that?
My advice to you. Try to use less, drive less, reduce your consumption of items. Or if you don’t want to, then don’t. Either way, we’ll be ok. Why? Our Artificial Intelligent overlords will be being invented in about 20-30 years and they’ll tell us what to do. So knock your sox off, stop paying attention to this dribble and look into something with more merit, like did Tiger Woods cheat or didn’t he?
