Snow on Mount Hamilton, near San Jose, California, 2008.
P.S. this weekend (2/14/2009) it was the same.
Posted on 02/15/2009 2:39:53 PM PST by Delacon
A corollary of Murphy's Law ("If something can go wrong, it will") is: "Things are worse than they can possibly be." Energy Secretary Steven Chu, an atomic physicist, seems to embrace that corollary but ignores Gregg Easterbrook's "Law of Doomsaying": Predict catastrophe no sooner than five years hence but no later than 10 years away, soon enough to terrify but distant enough that people will forget if you are wrong.
Chu recently told the Los Angeles Times that global warming might melt 90 percent of California's snowpack, which stores much of the water needed for agriculture. This, Chu said, would mean "no more agriculture in California," the nation's leading food producer. Chu added: "I don't actually see how they can keep their cities going."
No more lettuce for Los Angeles? Chu likes predictions, so here is another: Nine decades hence, our great-great-grandchildren will add the disappearance of California artichokes to the list of predicted planetary calamities that did not happen. Global cooling recently joined that lengthening list.
In the 1970s, "a major cooling of the planet" was "widely considered inevitable" because it was "well established" that the Northern Hemisphere's climate "has been getting cooler since about 1950" (New York Times, May 21, 1975). Although some disputed that the "cooling trend" could result in "a return to another ice age" (the Times, Sept. 14, 1975), others anticipated "a full-blown 10,000-year ice age" involving "extensive Northern Hemisphere glaciation" (Science News, March 1, 1975, and Science magazine, Dec. 10, 1976, respectively). The "continued rapid cooling of the Earth" (Global Ecology, 1971) meant that "a new ice age must now stand alongside nuclear war as a likely source of wholesale death and misery" (International Wildlife, July 1975). "The world's climatologists are agreed" that we must "prepare for the next ice age" (Science Digest, February 1973).
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
Because of today's economy, another law -- call it the Law of Clarifying Calamities -- is being (redundantly) confirmed. On graphs tracking public opinion, two lines are moving in tandem and inversely: The sharply rising line charts public concern about the economy, the plunging line follows concern about the environment. A recent Pew Research Center poll asked which of 20 issues should be the government's top priorities. Climate change ranked 20th.
Real calamities take our minds off hypothetical ones. Besides, according to the U.N. World Meteorological Organization, there has been no recorded global warming for more than a decade, or one-third of the span since the global cooling scare.
ping
“Gregg Easterbrook’s “Law of Doomsaying”: Predict catastrophe no sooner than five years hence but no later than 10 years away”
Gore must’ve read that
Snow on Mount Hamilton, near San Jose, California, 2008.
P.S. this weekend (2/14/2009) it was the same.
Does this mean I don’t have to do hormone therapy anymore?
What an ignorant statement. This guy is a scientist!?
California's snow pack melts every year, and has for thousands of years. If it didn't the entire range would be a giant glacier.
After the snow melts, the water is stored in reservoirs. You know, those things created by the dams the green weenies hate so much.
What a moron.
In 1969 my buddy and I took a dump truck up to Mt Hamilton, got a load of snow, took it back to San Jose and built a snowman in our front yards.
California's snow pack melts every year, and has for thousands of years. If it didn't the entire range would be a giant glacier.
No kidding! I live in the High Sierra and 90% of the snow melts each year.
It looks like the same piece. I'm pleasantly surprised WaPo ran this in their Sunday edition.
Sorry ND.
There’s nothing to be sorry about. I like this column, especially the gem about Ehrlich and his super-duper commodities advisor, Obama’s chief science advisor Holdrun(sp?).
A very important word for prognosticators is “might.”
additional at this duplicate topic:
Green Energy Doomsayers
Washington Post | 02/15/2009 | GEorge Will
Posted on 02/15/2009 7:16:48 PM PST by fiscon1
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-bloggers/2186494/posts
I generally assume that people who look at science from teh 1970s as evidence that science today is somehow wrong are still listening to music on 8-tracks and have rotary phones.
That type of rhetoric is as stupid as both sides looking out there windows and trying to judge how the climate is changing by their local weather. Just plain dumb.
Since Steven Chu is an atomic physicist, he has surely heard of the TTAPS study.
“I generally assume that people who look at science from teh 1970s as evidence that science today is somehow wrong are still listening to music on 8-tracks and have rotary phones.
That type of rhetoric is as stupid as both sides looking out there windows and trying to judge how the climate is changing by their local weather. Just plain dumb.”
Yep, that terribly stupid quote by that really dumb George Santayana just doesn’t apply anymore.
“Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. When change is absolute there remains no being to improve and no direction is set for possible improvement: and when experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it”.
BTW this isn’t a 70s thing. They have been predicting climate doom since the 1900s complete with headlines in the major papers of the time.
Yes, I loved that.
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