This makes a lot of sense if you are a rational thinking person. I thought I’d alert WUWT readers to it. Below is a table from the front page of Spaceweather.com today, operated by NOAA and Dr. Tony Phillips.
And this week, we saw what can happen when PHA’s come calling:
So in light of that, I thought this article was rather interesting.
Death from the Skies = Boring, Sweat from GHGs = Sexy [Jonah Goldberg]
Published at The Corner, part of NRO
From a longtime reader:
Dear Jonah,
I thoroughly enjoyed your article today, and not just because you touched on an area where I worked – at least tangentially – for over a decade. You are right, virtually nobody is doing the leg work on keeping track of all the debris and potentially nasty sized rocks out there compared to the number of people shrieking about our impending slightly warmer earth. The big reason is that it isn’t very sexy work, unlike being a proponent of Anthropocentric Global Warming (AGW). If you work on space debris, minor planet orbits and earth crossing orbits about the best you can hope for is getting to name a new rock nobody else saw, or maybe getting your name in the paper while being misquoted by some reporter who doesn’t have a clue about what preliminary results or margin of error means when he says that your recently discovered rock will destroy the earth in 2029.
By comparison if you use your computer model to predict that according to your model the earth might possibly warm by somewhere between 0.9 and 3.5 degrees Celsius by the year 2100 you get to hang out with Al Gore and Bono and morally scold the ignorant proles for driving their SUVs to pick up the kids from daycare as you jet off to Switzerland for another speaking engagement. Of course there is one other distinction. The guy cataloging rocks is actually doing science, and that’s hard work.
One of the problems many people, especially scientists, are starting to have with the AGW proponents is their use of shrill tone and authority of numbers to try to stifle debate. Science is not consensus, and though there can be a scientific consensus that doesn’t constitute science either. Computer models predicting conditions 50 years from now in a system as complex as the earth aren’t within spitting distance of science. To be science something has to be testable and falsifiable. It must produce a predicted data point, interaction or outcome that is unique to the theory and can be verified or falsified. Would you bet your future on the accuracy of day seven of a seven day weather forecast? That is essentially what we are being told by the AGW proponents we absolutely must do without delay. Of course I think the without delay part has more to do with “We must pass the stimulus without delay” or “We must pass healthcare without delay” considerations than any notion that waiting three or four years will actuall make any long term difference.
read the rest of the article at The Corner
h/t to Planet Gore
I agree.
We do get hit by big meteorites now and then, such as the great Siberian, but bigger objects pose a much larger threat. Even so the chances are very small, and although we neither have a good enough look out to spot all the possible collisions nor good enough technology to deal with an approaching object at the moment we almost certainly will in the not too distant future.
Whether our technology could develop enough to detect and deal with the dangers of a major eruption is less certain but given the rate of scientific, technical and economic progress who knows what we will be able to accomplish in the next century or two.
It is unlikely we would ever be able to do anything about a close supernova or indeed a nearby galaxy going bang except to shelter, survive and adapt, I seem to recall Hoyle wrote a rather good book about that. He also wrote a less good one about the threat of the coming ice age: in fact his prescription would not work but we probably already have good enough technology and sufficient economic resources to deal with it if it should transpire.
The point being that none of these are theoretical hazards, they have happened before and will again although the probability of any one, or indeed all happening in the next thousand years is tiny. And who knows what we will have achieved by the end of this millenium.
Whereas the supposed risk of a tipping point causing a dangerous increase in global temperatures is pure ill founded speculation based on very simplistic ideas of how the climate behaves; with one or another absurd speculation. piled upon the next to predict catastrophe.
It is similar to the amusement of childish minds who write therr names and addresses in their textobooks followed by the world, the solar system, the milky way and finally the universe. A perfectly good address of course but hardly useful.
Any more than those wonderful calculations about one grain of wheat on the first square of the chessboard, two on the next, two times two on the next and so on: or the how quickly the growing lilies which multiply at a given rate will take over the pond and eventually the world.
It is a superb example of arrogance and ignorance, arrogance in supposing our puny efforts could affect the global, as opposd to the local, climate in any way and utter ignorance of the vast natural forces which actually drive it and about which we know very little.
It is a modern form of the ancient and constantly recurring belief in the End of Days, just dressed up in pseudo scientific claptrap rather than mysticism. But then charlatans have never scrupled to borrow the philosophy of an age to peddle their quackery so it is little surprise in a a scientific age they resort to this approach.
Which is not to say there are not serious scientific researchers out there doing excellent work from which we will learn much in time when this hubbub has died down: as it surely will.
Remember despite endless prophecies, forecastsand predictions the End of Days is always late to the point of never quite arriving. Not that this deters the believer, it is obviously some slight miscalculation over the precise date so its arrival is only postponed.
But I wouldn’t hold my breath if I were you. Much less worry about it.
Because until the End of Days the world will go on spinning and we will get by by adapting and improving our technology to meet our needs as we have always done: and very successfully too.
Kindest Regards.
thank you for this information. I hope u ll go on helping us to learn this kind of important issues