Smith Island and Show Folks Drop a Truth Bomb.
The world is slowly catching up to the P4B
Before we deal with the truth bomb, let’s see a recent example of how a normal occurrence is blown into a cause for concern.
Last week 60 Minutes ran a story about Smith Island and [gasp] rising sea waters. They heavily implied that Smith Island is a victim of [gasp again] climate change! That’s the scary climate change we hear about today, not what’s been happening for the last 10k years.
Before you get loose stools, let’s examine the history of the island. Going back hundreds of years, this island and coastal areas like it were known for their mud flats, because they are…well…flat. There are no substantial elevations on Smith Island. It was doomed since before the first house was built on it. NOTHING was going to change that.
Smith is located on the Chesapeake Bay. The Chesapeake was once a river delta at the confluence of several rivers coming down form the north. If you were here 700 years ago, you would not have seen the open salt water vistas you see today. You’d have seen streams of fresh or brackish waterways swirling around countless islands and marshes. Many of the islands were habitable.
As we move further from the Ice Age, more ice melts and seas rise. That’s what ice does and subsequently, what seas do. There is nothing man-made about it. Almost all the islands in the bay were eventually taken by the water. The end for each island happens rather quickly as tides and winds wash away what left of them faster than the rise in sea levels can envelop them.
That’s what’s happening to Smith Island now. The 60 minutes piece does a slick job of telling the truth, but by emphasizing what doesn’t matter and de-emphasizing what is actually happening, the less than discerning viewer is left with the impression that it’s those goddamn SUV’s that are destroying the homes of these poor people.
The narrator is quite breathy about the rising water level, as if it’s happening faster at Smith Island than it is everywhere else on the planet. But they pay scant attention to the real problem the island has been looking at for decades now. Subsidence.
The island is in its irreversible death throes. As tides wash more and more water into the island substrate, it saturates into silt and is washed away. The island is sinking much faster than sea levels are rising. The rise is measuered in inches per decade. The subsidence measured in feet.
To be certain, this is tragic for old people who spent their lives here. It’s a bummer for those who bought here from skeezy real estate agents who for a few decades failed to inform them the island won’t be here much longer. Now, the situation is common knowledge. So if anyone buys there now, they’re just stupid.
One hearty resident featured on the 60 Minutes propganda piece, knowing fully the fate of the place, is building a house right on the water on piers that one may assume are driven down to bed rock. That may be the last surviving structure when the bay finally swallows the island. When that day comes, the distance between that house and the actual surface of the bay will not have changed very much.
The implied takeaway of the story is that someone must DO something! We’re told that people were offered a chance to abandon the island and the government offered them a bunch of YOUR money to relocate. Well, not optimum, but okay. Several residence did. Many passed on the deal.
By my lights, that should be the end of the discussion. Good luck to them. But there are crusaders who think we need to do more. We need to rub more iodine on a sucking chest wound.
To be certain, we could build a man-made citidel to keep the bay out. But even that is a temporary fix, very expensive and, to put it coldly, undeserved.
The federal and state government involve themselves every day in things they ought not. It would be a pointless and munumental waste of rescources to try to keep that island above the water line.
But as you’ll see below, that’s never been an impediment to loony government overreach.
In 2014, I wrote this as part of the book that would come to be called Street Politics: It Ain’t Your Daddy’s GOP Anymore.
9 On Global Warming
“I'm not a global warming believer. I'm not a global warming denier. I'm a global warming agnostic who believes instinctively that it can't be very good to pump lots of CO2 into the atmosphere but is equally convinced that those who presume to know exactly where that leads are talking through their hats.”
― Charles Krauthammer, Things That Matter: Three Decades of Passions, Pastimes and Politics
“There is nothing more anti-scientific than the very idea that science is settled, static, impervious to challenge.”
- Charles Krauthammer, 20 February 2014
Not since Scientology, has a scam of this magnitude been foisted on the world. I speak not of the theory. That is a little understood and inconsistent phenomenon, at best. Still, there might be some “there” there. For many, global warming has the ring of social issue, one of the phony issues we should be disengaging from. It’s easy to make that mistake considering all the propaganda surrounding it, generated by emotionalists and alarmists.
But if you consider the economic damage that would be inflicted by the daisies-in-the-sidewalk approach the left seems to favor, this becomes an economic issue of the first magnitude. Their response to what could be expected (not occurring yet) warming? Why, just destroy the coal industry and replace it with wind and solar power. Then, send billions – and over time – trillions of dollars to other countries so that they can develop clean energy alternatives. I will spare you the diatribe and let you read the details in my upcoming book about energy and economics1, but I will state simply that this money will NOT be used in these countries to build wind farms. They have other, more pressing problems, as do we.
The scientist chiefly credited with the GW/CC theory used two different statistical methods concurrently to achieve the now-discredited “Hockey stick” graph. Using the same methods in that manner you can make your birthday arrive earlier and earlier, each year.[1] But take away the hockey stick and you still have a gradual warming trend. Many contend that the trend has been in place since the last Ice Age. That is reasonable. But others say that we are creating an envelope of gasses that are causing the atmosphere to warm faster. There may be truth in this as well.
I have never heard anyone address the fact that, with or without these gasses, we are warming our atmosphere directly and radically by simply running everything. Have you ever wondered why, when seeing the day’s weather reported, the temperatures in cities, even small ones, are several degrees warmer than outside the cities? Is it a bubble of carbon dioxide floating above the city causing this? Of course not!
This is the result of mechanically generated heat from cars, trucks, busses, generators, pumps, computers, AC exhaust, ovens, stoves, etc.; hundreds of thousands of sources per city. Add to that the concentration of humans. If you don’t think that is an important heat source, count the number of times an empty room calls for the air conditioner to come on. Then send five people into the room for the day and see how many times it kicks on.
As our cities have grown, the temperatures in these locations have gone up.[2]
The last two paragraphs are, by far, more settled science than anything offered by the global warming/climate change alarmists…ever! None of the predictions made in the last two decades have come to pass. The excuses offered for us not seeing the disasters we were told were coming are many. Some may even be true. But this is unknowable.
Let’s get serious.
All that said, one can neither confirm nor deny GW/CC as a man-made emergency with the least certainty. Both sides have a difficult argument because clear conclusions cannot be drawn. We don’t even know what the optimum temperature of the planet is. We don’t know if we are moving toward it or away from it. The hurricanes generated in the tropics from Africa to the Americas will be few this year because, voila (there’s that French word again), the water in that region is colder than expected.
There are comments you can make, as a candidate, addressing the issue:
So far there is too little data to go on before committing trillions of dollars to developing countries. Just saying man-made global warming caused Super Storm Sandy does not make it so and is not justification for the economic hardship suggested.
If the science does become less murky and emotionally charged, there is no sense in the US raping its own economy if Russia, India and China do not go along at the same time. The US has made unbelievable strides since the 1970s in cleaning our air and water. That will continue because people have discovered that clean and efficient is more profitable. Let the East, Russia and Africa catch up.
People who say they can predict a .6 degrees change in temperature decades from now, as Obama is claiming, if we all switch to wind powered washing machines or solar powered toothbrushes, are liars. (Note, again, no one saw the cold water in the tropics coming.)
Claims that global warming is the greatest “national security” threat of our time are the most cynical and insidious of all the lies told on the subject to date. They are also the stupidest. This should pretty much put Martin O’Malley on Loser Street, where he belongs.[3]
The global warming propagandists will lose their minds hearing this. GOOD! Their shrill cry will get you mileage. More important, the average, levelheaded American will respond positively to an honest, responsible message about a subject that has often been handled with great irresponsibility.
[1] CORRECTIONS TO THE MANN et. al.al.al. (1998) PROXY DATA BASE AND NORTHERN HEMISPHERIC AVERAGE TEMPERATURE SERIES Stephen McIntyre 512-120 Adelaide St. West, Toronto, Ontario Canada M5H 1T1; Ross McKitrick, Department of Economics, University of Guelph, Guelph Ontario Canada N1G2W1 Yeah, I actually do read this stuff. I need a life!
[2] It is worth noting that hundreds of stations used to collect data now used to support man-made climate change alarmism are located in these very cities, often where development has surrounded the once-lonely stations. These are actually just boxes with sensors in them. They have been found next to steam plants, in newer, steaming hot parking lots and near large AC exhausts. And they have skewed the data wildly. Distorted data? Feds close 600 weather stations amid criticism they're situated to report warming, Maxim Lott, 13 August 2013, FoxNews.com/science
[3] Inside of a week, Martin O’Malley marked himself as one of the stupidest people ever to run for President. This is quite a challenge since he has Gore, Biden and Mondale for company. First, O’Malley apologized for saying that all lives matter as opposed to saying that only black lives matter. Then he blamed the rise of ISIS on GW/CC. U.S. military bases eyed as 'green job' incubators by Aaron Klein, WMD.com, 21 July 2015 and James Woods rips into '100% numbskull' Martin O'Malley by Cheryl Chumley, WMD.com, 20 July 2015. Little tip for voters: Both Emperor Obama and Empress Rodham have both said that GW/CC is a major threat to national security. Anyone who says these things should not get to play a President in a sitcom much less be elected President.
Further, in criticism of Obama’s pissing away money on his friends, claiming to address the GW/CC panic, I wrote.
For example, the government has pissed away $154 billion of your money on “green” energy swindles[1]. The companies involved were usually tinker toy operations with no hope of generating energy on a large, dependable scale. Or they were phony scams intended to fail, while the top brass left with your money still in their pockets. That’s more than $4000 wasted for every man, woman and child in this country.
[1] FAIL: US HAS WASTED $154 BILLION ON 'RENEWABLE ENERGY', Breitbart.com, 5 December 2013. Pay particular attention to the kickbacks and sleazy politics involved.
Using the same over-the-top propaganda and scam model, the federal government has continued to fleece you by telling you they are saving the planet. Cronies have scooped up trillions to fund projects costing much less which will have no positive impact on your lives or your environment.
I have said repeatedly since 2020 that in 25 years, wind turbines will be rotting, rusting hulks blighting our landscape. You can only scam so much money for the same wind farm, then it falls into disrepair. The original owners will have long since sold out or declared bankruptcy.
It will require another multi-trillion, multi-decade project cleaning up the land of the wind and solar waste. These funds will go to the same types of cronies who will over charge for the service.
I’ve skipped my rant on how these giant pinwheels fuck up surface winds and migratory bird populations. Or how stupid and inefficient it is to line them up in rows. You can look that up.
The ray of hope
Slowly, over the years, more and more people have twigged to the scam. Even some media organizations are questioning the bullshit. But Hollywood hung in with the scam like a hair in a biscuit.
Until now.
You may have seen this video already. It’s getting a lot of play on social media. Either way, give is a listen. The world is catching up to the P4B. It’s not lost on me that Billy Bob Thornton is a dork. In real life he always looks like he’s in a fashion show at the homeless shelter. He’s a perpetual 12 year old. But you take ‘em where you can get ‘em. The message nails reality!
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I never wrote that book. But Bjorn Lomborg did. The Skeptical Environmentalist.