Guest Post by Karl Denninger
Yeah, you’re leading to my next point. Part of the solution to this problem or this set of problems associated with climate change is getting the deniers out of our discourse. You know, we can’t have these people – they’re absolutely toxic.
So what are you going to do Bill? What do you advocate? Gas-filled showers?
How do you respond to the recalcitrant skeptics, the ones who say, “OK, I acknowledge that the earth is heating up, and I understand why that’s a bad thing. However, we don’t really know what’s causing that. And we don’t really know to what degree humans are responsible.”Yes, we do! It’s human activity. It’s the burning of fossil fuels and the release of methane, a natural gas mostly from agriculture, but to a lesser extent from leakage, so-called fugitive gas from an oil field. But these are solvable problems.
Oh, so now we see some of the reality poking through. Methane, mostly from agriculture. You know, cow farts, basically.
So the solution is to kill you with refined grains instead. Think I’m kidding? Actually, I’m not. There are in fact a bunch of people, and Nye appears to have joined that bandwagon, who like to claim that we can do this sort of thing without monstrous harm to humans on the planet, in fact harm that grossly outweighs anything “climate change” could do. They lie flat-out about evolutionary reality — one common claim is that “refined grains” made possible the large brain size that is characteristic of humans.
The truth is that the human genome, that is, homo sapiens, has been more-or-less fixed for about 100,000 years, and the line that led us there has been evolving for millions of years. We’ve been using refined grains in all forms for about 6,000 years, or at most 6% of modern man’s human history and, in evolutionary terms, for less than 1% of it.
This sort of nonsense is a flat-out lie.
So is the nonsense that we can replace fossil fuels with wind. Well, at least if you’d like your light switch to work all the time, instead of just when the wind is blowing, or you’d like to be able to get in your car and drive from, oh, Chicago to Atlanta — more-or-less non-stop.
See, this is the problem when you get down to it — we don’t use fossil fuels because we’re mean, earth-destroying monsters. We use them because they contain a lot of Joules (BTUs if you prefer) of energy in a reasonable amount of space.
Further, CO2 is not an evil gas. It has been higher in atmospheric concentration than it is now (by quite a bit) and lower. The higher the CO2 concentration the better plants grow, and we want that since Bill (and everyone else) refuses to talk about exponents in the context of human population growth and the inevitable nature of how that interacts with the finite size and mass of this planet.
As for sea levels they’ve been higher and lower too — by a lot. There’s a place out here in the Gulf about 10ish miles offshore called The Timberholes. It’s a diving and fishing destination; there’s a lot of underwater structure comprised of holes in limestone. Guess where it got its name? That’s right — those holes are there from the previous presence of trees a very long time ago.
At present that “land” is at an elevation of 100′ underwater and that didn’t happen due to seismic or plate tectonic activity either; there is no active fault in the area. In short those former tree stands were drowned by entirely-natural changes in the level of the sea and I assure you that when it happened there were no gas-guzzling SUVs or human-husbanded cows farting up the atmosphere.
Grains — whole, ancient or neither — are under attack. Just as we have finally embraced vegetables on our plates, grains and starches have started disappearing from our meals at a rapid clip. Go to many a restaurant, and good luck finding rice, bread or potatoes next to your hunk of meat or fish. Top restaurateurs have whispered into my ear that people simply don’t want any grains, so they have cut back on serving them. Yet, if you have visited drought-plagued California lately, you know it is high time to rethink our meat-based diet and hit reset.
In other words we can just ignore mathematics if we stop eating animals.
Well, maybe for a little while. But not for long. As I’ve pointed out repeatedly, including in this post from 2011, exponents are just a mathematical fact and nothing you can do about it will change them — or what happens to you if you react to the impending doom they show you by trying to “work around” the edges instead of stopping their progression.
Note that the above link willfully and intentionally ignores the mathematical reality of an exponentially-increasing population and at the same time tries to kill you with higher levels of Type II diabetes and heart attacks!
No folks, there is no answer found there, just as there isn’t in Bill Nye’s mathematics-denying nonsense when it comes to “climate change.”
And by the way, Bill, if you think I’m getting in the boxcar you’re wrong since I know what’s on the other end of the rail line; history has taught me that climbing in will be my last voluntary act.
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