In Awe of Climate

Yesterday, Sept. 4, 2019, 425 days from next year's U.S. 2020 election, ten presidential aspirants gathered for a Climate Town Hall for hours. It and almost all the next get together and discussions to follow will be pivotal in one particular way. One of these candidates could conceivably shape the critical agenda for running the next government in case the present administration is voted out of office. It shall be a huge switch in policy because as one of the candidates said last night, "Every Policy Should Be Informed by Climate Change."  What that means could be subject to interpretation, but for what it is worth, it can mean that climate change will dictate, influence and likely be the last word in how the new government will conduct its business. 

To paraphrase Shakespeare's Mark Anthony from "Julius Caesar", the candidates all came to bury the climate change deniers and praise every conceivable initiative towards zero emissions and to warn us - this country in particular although notably absent were criticism against the rest of the world - on the now common refrain about existential threats the whole world is about to face in just a matter of less than two decades, twelve years being the favorite time frame.

And once again, climate deniers - anyone and all who do not support the policies of these candidates and their supporters - are doomed ignorant, backward looking, uneducated, unsophisticated citizens.  Their votes or their opinions are those only belonging to this country's ill-advised taxpayers. Taxpayers nevertheless, so their share of payments towards running the government is welcome but they do not have a voice because what good is it to listen to the ignorant and the unenlightened.

Let's see how the ignorant and the unenlightened can stand up to the nobility of the candidates that included one who espoused a holier-than-thou kind of theology when he said,

“If you believe that God is watching” as humanity spews pollutants, “what do you think God thinks of that?” he asked. “This is less and less about the planet as an abstract thing and more about specific people suffering specific harm because of what we’re doing right now. At least one way of talking about this is that it’s a kind of sin.”

That is supposed to be from the enlightened and sophisticated, highly educated by one of the nation's foremost houses of learning - the elite university.

Let's see how well enlightened they really are. Or, how the ignorant, the uneducated and the simple minded can be more pragmatic than they are given credit for.  Let's see how the enlightened knows their geology, paleontology or if they even have a working knowledge about the adaptation of species.

Let's talk about "existential threat". As a species, the modern human emerged about between 200,000 to 300,000 years ago. If earth's history is written in a book over a million pages thick, the entire history of our  species, modern human in its present form, would belong in the last single page.  The rest of all the species that ever lived (from early micro-organisms to dinosaurs and the woolly mammoth) would be in about 750,000 pages.  T-Rex and all the dinosaurs that ruled the earth for 160 million years will actually have just several pages dedicated to their story. It is boundless human pride to think of how truly important we are, or how truly powerful we are to be able to manipulate, or impose a particular opinion or agenda towards controlling climate.

Read a quote from a PBS (not exactly a bastion of conservatism) TV program:

"Of all species that have existed on Earth, 99.9 percent are now extinct. Many of them perished in five cataclysmic events. According to a recent poll, seven out of ten biologists think we are currently in the throes of a sixth mass extinction". 

Let's be clear about one thing.  Those five cataclysmic events occurred eons before there were gasoline combustion engines or coal fired electric generating plants.

Another thing to be clear about is that species survived each time, albeit only a tiny, tiny slice of living organisms did and we're one of the beneficiaries of their latest survival.  Why we survived is called adaptation - by our early ancestors.   

Let's digress for just a bit. There is quite a bit of emphasis on diversity and racial identification in this day and age. Let's talk about that. The enlightened may not know this but the primary reason we have a diversity in skin pigmentation, hair color, the color and shape of our eyes, our general skeletal differences among different people were all due to climate change. We must never forget this.  Why do you think we have the scale of skin pigments track the different zones where people live? It is no coincidence that pigments vary from dark to light based on the zone's distances from the equator. Darker skin protected our ancestors from too much sun while those from temperate or colder climes needed fairer skin to absorb Vitamin D and other benefits of sunlight where it is less. Had there been people living then in what is now Minnesota or Montana and similar latitude anywhere around the world,  when these places had a tropical climate millions of years ago we would have had a different configuration of races.  Climate changes at the time that they occurred  and the localization of their effects around various parts of the globe over thousands of years created the kind of diversity we see today.

Existential threat.  Let's talk about that. Talk to the spirits of species that went extinct because of one climatic change after another. And what about natural disasters brought by severe and wide spread volcanic eruptions (spewing carbon and sulfur a billion times more than produced during rush hour in Mexico City and Beijing and Mumbai and LA combined, lasting for centuries).  Species survived. There were no cars or hydrocarbon-fed industries to blame then.

67 million years ago an asteroid the size of Mt. Everest hit what is now The Yucatan Peninsula. Talk about climate change that followed. It wiped out the dinosaurs.  Mammals which before then barely eked out a minimalist form of existence emerged to become the dominant species. From their development came to be our ancestors. We were brought up by climate change.

I actually have a hundred pages worth of musings on the subject but I will spare the reader. Let's get to the bottom line. Many, or rather  politicians and their elite luminary sympathizers and supporters,  will want to insure the extinction of thousands upon thousands of jobs held by people who only want to feed their families or to pursue a livelihood. The same politicians will want to forever alter how businesses and the economy function, because climate change ought to be halted, arrested or re-directed according to ideology based on their own sense (likely to be wrong) of world history.

The so called existential threat is that which will put an end to common sense. Or, an end to the existence of particular industries that employ millions of people world wide without regard to how we the people will pay for the programs against perceived threats according to a class of people pretending to be the enlightened ones. Let us not forget that predictions of the very same nature we hear today are mere reiterations from as early as three decades ago.

I only have this one scenario to leave with the reader. What if, God forbid, the San Andrea's Fault does create a major tantrum around the area that straddles both mega cities of LA and San Francisco. Major rescue supplies among other things will be water. Will rescuers be allowed to come in with truckloads upon truckloads of water in pallets of plastic bottles, as were the means to help every disaster anywhere in the world? Think about just that one little thing. I hope that will trigger a few other thoughts about common sense. Today, only hydro carbon vehicles, both by land and air can get over quickly to rescue the affected.  One prominent candidate wants to put an end to gasoline combustion engines. But they have no clue that electric vehicles will get their nightly charge from the electric grid connected with an umbilical  cord to generating plants run mostly on hydrocarbon, over a third on coal, a small percentage on nuclear. 

Here is the biggest kicker of all. If solar and wind power were to replace all the generating plants cited above, an area the size of the entire state of California will be needed, cleared of all trees and vegetation, where solar panels can be laid out flat, end-to-end, side-to-side, and for wind turbines to stand tall. That's about right, plus every citizen's fervent hope and prayer that the wind blows and the sky is clear. Every day, 365 days a year. That is for the USA alone. How many of these solar panels and wind turbines will have to be manufactured for the entire planet?  But wait! Are we forgetting how and where to get the amount of energy to mine for steel and aluminum and copper, transport the ore, smelt all the metals needed to build the structures, manufacture all the solar panels, batteries (lithium has to be mined too). Think, which comes first - the chicken or the egg.  

The death of common sense is the biggest existential threat. An army of thought police, political correctness and a wayward sense of balance will be the end to open discussion and cooperation from all minds, if only one voice is allowed to speak.