Top Gear

One of the things I like most about this show is the way the fellows keep making fun of Global Warming.

"It's the coldest winter ever recorded [at suchandso site], thanks to global warming."

Ha ha.

The first claims about human-driven climate change began in the Sixties (haha, when else would anything that stupid have started?) when a steady drop in temperatures had been observed for the previous two decades. That was when the great global climate hysteria began. "The planet is going to freeze," they wailed.

As for myself, I had grown up in the Sixties. I taught myself to read at the age of two (just by "picking it up" and learning the rules), so I was an avid reader from a very young age. Almost all my education came at home, years before I was exposed to it in school, hence my name, Autodidact. I skipped two grades in school and still found myself to be ahead of the other kids, but since I refused to do homework in subjects I already knew, I was a horrible student and never learned to discipline my use of time.

One of my favorite books was a Golden Books publication (not "Little Golden Books") on geology and geography. It discussed rocks and the construction of the earth from the core on outward, volcano morphology, fossils, the ancient ages of the planet, and on and on. This was a large book, around 8 x 10, a couple of hundred pages long, written I think at a middle school level, loaded with information and good pictures. If you home school, get that book for your kids and you won't need any other Earth Science books. If you think they should have Earth Science at a high school level, skip the high school texts and send them to the local community college to take introductory Earth Science.

Published around 1964, it came out when the theory on plate tectonics was somewhat new; it also mentioned glaciers and the ice ages. Their thesis was, "The most recent ice age ended only ten thousand years ago, so the earth will continue to get warmer and warmer till the next ice age begins in about fifty thousand years."

From this I learned at age 10 to think of global temperatures in terms of tens of thousands of years. Anything less than that was a pitifully short-sighted. Ten years? forty years? even a hundred or five hundred years? What a joke!

I ignored politics around the time I came of age. Not because I didn't want to know anything but because I didn't bother with the main sources of information. As a seventeen-year-old living on her own, I was too poor to subscribe to newspapers or magazines. I didn't watch TV because I had given mine away. But in 1974 I entered college at the advanced age of 21 and was inundated with political information. It all came from the left. As enlightened human beings, we didn't want to hear anything the evil right wing had to say. They were, after all, filthy, racist bastards who were rich as hell and wanted to keep it all for themselves. Who could listen to such demons?

I'm not joking. We did think that way, if you can call making conclusions of false stereotypes "thinking". We believed that our beliefs were difficult but kind-hearted and well-meaning, because our intentions were to do the most good to the most people. Holding these beliefs made us the good people, and opposing our beliefs meant the opponent was bad, or worse, was evil. That's the most we needed to know. To think any deeper than that, and justify what we stood for, or to explain it to one another, was absurd. Therefore we had no apologetic.*

(*If you don't know the word, it means "offering an explanation for what you believe." It's a good word, write it down.)

We were suckers for social issues. For example, we had been told by our hysterical teachers that both Russia and the U.S. were going to unleash nuclear holocaust on one another and we would all die from radiation poisoning. Not everyone in America believed this, but a lot of the Left sure did. Introduce any idea, frame it as a crisis, a desperate situation needing a rescuer, and instantly a large percentage of us would come running, singing "Here am I, Lord, use me!" because it was the good thing to do. The saviors of the world, we were.

In the Seventies the issue of the day was Global Cooling. Some feared the global cooling would be caused by Nuclear Winter as caused by all the shading ash those nukes were going to cause when they all went off together. Others just assumed that all the dirt we were pumping into the air was going to shade the surface of the planet enough to let it cool. Many figured we were going to destroy the ozone layer (do school children get taught about that today?). In any scenario they came up with, it was an immediate disaster needing immediate remedies.

This endured right into the Eighties. I remember around 1998 finding a certain book listed on amazon.com titled, "The Coming Global Winter (and what you can do about it)" published in 1978, but the author's name I have forgotten. Right next to it was "Coming Global Warming* (and what you can do about it)" It was published in 1991 by the same author. (*I have to admit I have forgotten the exact title, "warming" could have been "thermal holocaust" or "heat disaster" for all I know; regardless, it was about AGW.)

Not one of these people has the depth of knowledge or the ability to see a larger picture, both of which are needed to understand climate change. Of course the climate of planet earth changes. It always has changed. And of course for the last 100 years it has changed a tiny bit. So what? The average temperature of the earth could climb five degrees C and you still wouldn't have a global disaster. Our planet has been a lot warmer and for a longer time than a puny hundred years in the past. Crocodiles once walked on Greenland.

Where do we even get the idea that we have the right (even if we could) to force the Earth to be cooler than it wants to be, if not from human chutzpa? The same source tells us we could change the earth on such a scale. From my experience, it is beyond the scope even of a very powerful human brain to fathom just how much energy goes into a common earthquake or a cold front, never mind turning a hurricane to some new direction or causing the earthquake at a certain time.

But don't underestimate the skill of the Left to change their minds at the drop of a hat and re-define any debate in any way they choose. They never meant JUST global warming, they meant that our actions are changing global climate patterns and making summer and winter more severe, hence "global climate change".

Baloney.

The world has USUALLY been warmer than it is now. We are pouring a lot of CO2 into the atmosphere, but is it more than the trees and algae can convert back to O2 ? Is having less than 1% of the atmosphere as CO2 bad for the status quo? Venus has a 100% CO2 atmosphere and is hotter than it should be, when mathematically considering the amount of sunlight that falls on its surface. But does that mean that a 1%-CO2 atmosphere is also a greenhouse?

And look what fools our pro-AGW lobby are. After denying for 20 years that a century of temperature readings was meaningless, suddenly such short-term temperature variations ARE irrelevant and the bigger picture DOES count.

And they're still belitting and eviscerating the naysayers who have always maintained that the big picture is what counts.