Sam Outcalt: Climate change and the Tooth Fairy
Within Boulder County there is a strong and widespread belief that the current extreme weather events are produced by anthropogenic global warming. Without considering the scientific merits of this theory or religion a simple consideration of the implications of its validity might be instructive.
If true, the vast expenditure of global, national, state, county and municipal funds to attenuate its effects have failed.
If false, the current climate shift is the result of natural processes over which mankind has no control.
These options suggest that the current efforts to regulate the global climate are either ineffective or misdirected.
I doubt that this short note will diminish the strongly held belief within the county that these efforts are effective. Redirection of some funds spent in Boulder County on the study and regulation of the Earth’s climate might be better spent on an Annual Tooth Fairy Festival, as the Tooth Fairy is a much cheaper abstraction based on similar logic.
The remainder of the funding should be terminated to aid in balancing the city, county, state and federal budgets.
SAM OUTCALT
Longmont
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highflight56433 says: “At an elevation of ~ 5344 ft msl (dependent on which rock you stand) , there might be a correlation between altitude and mindless thinking….”
I once lived in Denver and soon concluded that hypoxia accounted for many of the strange behaviours and customs there. The driving is as bad as I’ve seen anywhere. Many drive on snow tires, winter and summer. Bald snow tires. The driving schools there use former kamakaze pilots to teach passing strategy.
So, that’s “Boulderdash” explained
Judith Curry has defected to the realists side folks. Phil Jones has gone into the witness protection program and Algore has made hundreds of millions of dishonest carbon-trading dollars. When we all wake up from this, the largest and most successful hoax in history, the skeptics will chortle and the [SNIP: We’re not applying that term to anyone, OK? -REP] (warmist fanatics) will seek to distance themselves from the antics of the IPCC, Peter Glieck, and Micheal get-me-a-lawyer Mann.
The die-hards will, as always, grow old and gray decrying Big (fill in the blank), but the rest of us will just try to forget how stupid some of us ( eco-fascists) were.
SanityP says:
August 7, 2012 at 10:20 am
Soon enough we will see this logic: “The climate is changing the weather”.
You have already seen this in 2012. Remember: “This is what climate change looks like.” Extreme WEATHER more likely due to CLIMATE Change. Bring on the snow and cold!!!
Well enough said, although there is always room for improvement.
Climate is an abstraction whereas weather is reality. It is critical to the process of learning to understand natural processes that humans understand the difference between reality and abstraction.
Time distant results of chaotic processes (weather) can not be predicted nor controlled with any precision but can be described within certain boundaries (climate) that are often exceeded by so called 10, 50, 100 year events, etc. which are merely reframing time component since humans always seem concentrate on the short term.
We have done poorly at measuring temperature aspects of weather and even more poorly at generalizing those events/behaviors into climate. We should be doing a lot better and we certainly know how to do it with statistically adequate replicated random samples.
so far, just Garbage In, Garbage Out — period.
@Robert Brown: Note well that Somalia has the highest number of pirates and the lowest carbon emissions of any country.
Au Contraire! The USA, European Union, and Australia have many more pirates than Somalia. The Pirates over here don’t wear eye-patches and are more likely to wear Gucci. They don’t ply the seas, but instead ply the halls of government. They enrich themselves by hijacking government agencies. Booty is moved from national treasuries to their comrades in arms in broad daylight and the dark of night. They do fly under false colors and they take no prisoners.
“You cannot bend reality with your will…”
The practicioners of high magick say you can. Though, their methods are more scientific and reproducible than those of the climate alarmists.
I chuckled … because I once worked with somone whose child lost a tooth while on a vacation trip to Denver and who was told that there would be no money under the pillow that night “because the tooth fairy can’t fly up this high”.
He may come home some evening to find a sofa or two aflame on his front porch (a popular pastime with the college fraternities in Boulder).
These are the same folks that use to bus their homeless residents to Denver, so they could claim they didn’t have a homeless problem.
When I was a kid, the tooth fairy replaced them with a dime. When my daughter was a kid, the tooth fairy replaced them with a dollar.
This shows that the effect of AGW was minor in the 1950s and became 900% worse by the 1990s. Jim Hansen may be right after all.
There must be an “optimum” climate that we are striving to get back to…but what is it?
@Pathway
What in the world would make you mention the “homeless” problem? Ever since the election of November, 2008, that problem has been solved. It must have been because I can’t recall hearing the word since then in the main stream media. Now, my eyes did deceive me the other day in Atlanta, when they saw a larger homeless congregation there than those eyes had ever before witnessed. Just goes to show how important it is to scientifically study a thing rather than trust your lying eyes.
nuclearcannoli says:
August 7, 2012 at 10:18 am
Actually this is a highly flawed piece. You see, when I was young and lost a tooth and put it under my pillow, I woke up and there was money there instead. So there is actually some minor circumstantial evidence for the tooth fairy’s existence. The same really can’t be said for the perpetually rebranded catastrophic anthropogenic global warming.
Actually, the parallel is apt. You put a naturally occuring biological waste product (tooth) in a certain environment laced with mythological symbolism and receive capital (parental cash).as a result.
Warmists place a naturally occuring environmental event (climate) in a certain environment laced with mythological symbolism (mainstream media) and receive capital (government grants and foundationally laundered tax shelter cash) as a result.
Note prime sources for funding both are the parents. The tooth fairy has significantly lower overhead and a much better ROE.
Good Job, Mr. Outcalt, but you left out the most common reason given in history for failures of movements and states, that of “not enough”- the lack of purity and completeness of the movement- “not enough”.
Socialists, Communists, Marxists and supporters of tyranny in general always use the excuse for this or that regimes failures as- they just weren’t “Socialist enough”, or “Communist enough”, or whatever. Lenin explained that the failures of the Socialist revolutionary Paris Commune was because they weren’t militant enough, they hadn’t seized complete and total power over all aspects of the state, they hadn’t killed enough people.
They weren’t Socialist “enough”.
And what do we see? Only about 300,000 people are known to have died so far due to efforts to control the climate- obviously not enough.
Climate Change…..The only constant in Climate is Change.
Climate Change has occurred over all time periods of Earth’s existence, and will continue into the future, and it is predominantly if not completely Natural.
I move we tax on the ‘rich’ to purchase costume jewelry for those who are energy-deficient.
The City and County of Boulder should lead by example. Turn off the air conditioning in summer and turn down the heat in winter, wear sweaters. Lead by example.
Maurice@TheMount says:
“Climate Change…..The only constant in Climate is Change.”
Exactly. ‘Climate’ and ‘Change’ are inseparable, at least on this planet. You could probably go as far as to say that we, if not ALL life, owe it’s existence to climate change. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.
When it STOPS changing is when we/this planet is in trouble—most likely means our sun has gone supernova…
Working towards stopping CAGW is like working towards stopping poverty: for those who make the effort, the total erasure of the problem is not as important as knowing one has made a bad situation at least a little better. The story of thowing a starfish washed up on the beach after a storm comes to mind: although it makes no difference to the thousands of starfish on the beach about to die, it makes a big difference to the one you throw back in.
At least that is how efforts towards ending CAGW can be viewed. Every bit helps, and if some of us start to help, perhaps a groundswell will occur that will go the distance. If nobody starts, nothing goes anywhere.
There are many things we cannot control in this life. The outcome of something that needs a majority invovlement is one of them. We can control what we do, however. Making an attempt resolves at least the individual’s moral dilemma.
Our individual effort make have no positive results, but we’ll never know until we try: the Schrodinger’s Cat problem.
Letter to the Bishop of Exeter cc. Archbishop of Canterbury Bishop of London Archbishop of Westminster As the spirit moves
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/jamesdelingpole/100166881/another-even-better-letter-to-the-bishop-of-exeter-on-the-subject-of-wind-farms/
Those are my principles, and if you don’t like them… well, I have others.
Groucho Marx
No question about it, those Boulder(ite)s are as dense as rock !
@tz2026
I was drinking my coffee when I read your witches comment, I laughed so hard I had to clean up the desk 🙂
Oh that is already in the works, the public in Boulder county think they can do a better job or running a power company than Xcel energy, and are trying to “localize” their power with low carbon energy sources etc. I suspect that in about 5-10 years they will figure out that they have costs that are far higher than they expect and their “democratic and green” energy solutions are not as good as they expect. The rest of the state is just sitting back and watching as they quietly paint themselves into a corner.
http://www.bouldercolorado.gov/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=14730&Itemid=4923
The bad news is that energy rate payers will have to foot the bill for this wishing well energy system they have in mind.
Larry
There is also in Colorado, the Peoples Republic of Aspen, also known as Chicago Lite. Tooth Fairy logic does real well there too.