Climate Change Follies

Bill Clinton, dispensing his wisdom in Davos, Switzerland, proclaims “climate change” the biggest problem in the world. Al Gore must have slipped him a cheat sheet because I doubt Honest Bill has done his own homework on the matter. Still, this type of sweeping broad prioritization of danger is a bit an overstatement even to professional climate researchers such as UW Madison Associate Scientist Stephen Vavrus.

Climate Changes is One of Top Issues: "I wouldn't go quite that far," said Stephen Vavrus, an associate scientist at the UW-Madison Center for Climatic Research. "There are so many problems that exist and will exist regardless of climate change."

So climate change may not be the ONLY problem in the world, but like almost all grant funded climate researchers, Vavrus believes the orthodoxy that the atmosphere has been changed by mankind, which must logically lead to the conclusion that we are existing in an unnatural state of being. Being unnatural means that the four billion years of continual life on this sun warmed rock in cold space is "potentially" threatened.

"Basically, for better or for worse, we are conducting a big experiment on the world. We're changing - and have already changed - the composition of the atmosphere drastically and we don't really know exactly what's going to happen."

He used another diagram to show climate change going back a millennium - to 1000 A.D. The graph was flat with a dramatic spike in the 20th century and the largest jump in the 1990s. … "This really suggests that things that are happening now really are unusual. Not just in the recent past but (over) the more distant past, too."

To call 1000 years ago the “distant past” is to illustrate the point that you can teach dogma to intelligent people. It is also a good example that memorization, knowledge and wisdom are different, which is why they have separate words.

Vavrus predicted that the number of extremely hot days will increase dramatically in the future. That, combined with an aging population - which doesn't survive as well in hot temperatures - is going to problematic, he pointed out. But like economics, climate change is not an exact science. "I'm almost certain there will be surprises. The system is too complicated," he said.

Of all the hypothetical dangers imagined by the climate change cult, the idea that old people are to stupid to seek shelter from the heat is at the top of the intelligence insulting arguments. Do they believe people in Florida retire to Wisconsin to escape warmth? Still I love the admission that climate science is complicated like economics. If computer models could predict the future of chaotic dynamic systems, then there would never be losers on Wall Street.