I breath a long sigh of relief. Climate Change, Global Warming, polar ice cap melting, Florida Flooding are all 'Inconvenient Lies'. The world is fine.
Well, not exactly. The new book by the Freakonomics authors, Levitt and Dubner, take a new look at climate change and basically their cerebral cell pool contributed by at least a room fool of highly qualified nerds has found that all science evidence to date is oversimplified, flawed and uses approximately the same thing to yield the same results. Yes, there is a higher level of CO2 in our atmosphere today and, yes, the temperature has risen but the two things are not related. The key greenhouse gas on earth is is fact water vapour. So our quest to vilify CO2 as a gas and limit all those who create it and push it into the atmosphere is wholly wrong and we should all be publicly raspberried at for doing so. Kyoto, schmoto.
It will come as good news to a few friends of mine who are very happy in their knowledge that Al Gore and his loony crew have a warped agenda to make $billions out of Climate Change and it is huge corporations who are behind the sinister plots. The green lobby are just former bra-burners and US airfield protesters - they are career activists just hopping on causes like the rest of us would change jobs, it's just what they do.
The Freaky Boys have now proven (evidence to be supplied) that CO2 levels when mammals were created were 1000 parts per million (ppm) in the atmosphere and now they are at a mere 380 ppm, while the world actually is saying beyond 450 ppm it would be best to vacate the planet and the last one out switch off the lights. No only that but their own analysis of ice cores at the Poles have revealed something that all other scientists have missed and that is that CO2 levels have historically risen AFTER the temperature of the earth has risen.
What the small team of clever people who are Intellectual Ventures (IV), a kind of real-life Scooby Doo team of guys who go around debunking ghost theories and similar, say is that because Climate Change scientists are so primitive in their modelling, they basically all use tiny variations on the same theme and therefore come up with the same results. Their own super-modelling actually looks at the complex array of natural phenomena to work out the real situation. Here, they encounter a problem. Because the required computer power is so very large, it will be some 30 years before they will have enough of it to produce the answer. Would it not be very Douglas Adams-esque if the answer popped out after all that time was simply 42 - oops, that was the meaning of life, maybe 43 then. Worse still would be - 'They were right, you have 10 seconds to live.'
The danger with meddling with things with a small amount of knowledge and trying to be jacks of all trades because you believe you are smarter than everyone is that it creates an air of hubris. I am not entirely convinced by the evidence of the Green Lobby, but I know one thing. There has never been an organism in the earth's history that has been capable of creating such a large scale, unnatural effect on the ecosystem that is the planet. We have to understand, whether it is by 'good stewardship' as the Freaky Boys would ask, or by practical tackling of the way we live, we need to make changes in order to sustain the planet long term for life - the rock will exist long after humans are extinct, that much is certain. It is a chilling fact about nature but the longest surviving species tend to be the most simple.
The book no doubt will be a great success and a good read. I just think 20 or so guys in a room with plenty of brain power nit-picking over documents written by guys who have spent their life gathering evidence and meticulously recording it all, does not mean they are right. Scientists have proven many times that they are wrong but the manifestations of scientific work and the revolution of industry has allowed such individuals as those in IV to become free-thinking people who are taken ultra-seriously. It comes as no surprise that many of them are ex-corporate boys who have made so much money they no longer have to work. Some of them have a claim to fame for sophisticated weaponry - well, they would ate greenists, wouldn't they? Scientists are rarely millionaires, they do it because they are driven by the pursuit of knowledge and discovery.
IV and the Freaky Boys are in the pursuit of applying their own smartness, not honed on the drab experiments of career scientists, but in the 'Thought Rooms' of progress that a is a glorified meeting room with copious donuts, Starbucks coffee and cooky playthings. After all, real science is for wimps and has-beens.
The Great Debate that is whether man is affecting the Earth so much that we will cut off our own life support system is likely to never really occur. Too many people think they know the answers already and many just don't want to know. However, perhaps like the financial disaster that just occurred, we learn nothing in hindsight that helps us for the future. The problem we have about Climate Change is that if and when the disaster predicted occurs, hindsight will be of no use anyway as there will be no future.
I just hope that books like this make sure the debate is had and not just end it because we don't have enough computer power. After all, in the same book the clever people advocate that suicide bombers should get life insurance.
Make up your own mind if this is a serious debate.
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