Wrong Again, Chicken Little

The Global Warming kooks are at it again, folks, and now they say it's even worse than the last time they predicted Armageddon. I discovered in the online edition of The Scotsman today that we have 50 years tops, and then we're all toast. "Ooooohhh, wow," some of you might be thinking, "it's 2000 scientists that all agree with each other! That's a really big number, maybe there's something to this..." There is. It's called a tax on carbon output on each and every person in the "whirled" community. It's a government slush fund. It's a scary bedtime story by a bunch of guys in lab coats nodding at eachother as to what might be happening based on 100 years of data. So, why isn't it working? The Independent also ran a story today that says while 80% of Britons feel global warming is a threat, half of them are not planning on changing their lifestyles. I can here them now; "So what? The sun is hotter. What do you want me to do, shoot a water pistol at it?"

Good point, Tommy, but there are other sides to the story. Perhaps you've never heard of the Croll-Milankovitch Hypothesis. You see, the Earth's orbit around the sun (GASP!) may not be static. Here's an excerpt from "The Orbital Forcing Model," which I discovered at http://astro.temple.edu/~andy/Contents/Research/orbitalforcing.htm

"Beginning with the orbital forcing variables as summarized by Berger (1988); Fischer & Bottjer (1991); De Boer & Smith (1994) and House (1995), herein it is assumed that the fundamental orbital forcing signal is the precessional signal (Anderson & Goodwin, 1990; 1992). The strength of this signal is directly related to the degree of eccentricity of the Earth’s orbit. As eccentricity increases and summers occur near perihelion (in the precessional cycle) insolation at high latitudes reaches a maximum (Fig. 1 Precessional hot summers.jpg). If those summers occur in a hemisphere with large areas of continent at high latitude then high insolation values may trigger the melting of accumulated continental glacial ice. When summers occur near aphelion with high eccentricity (Fig. 2 Precessional cold summers.jpg), the resulting long series of cool summers may trigger renewed build up of high-latitude, continental glacial ice. Principles relating orbital forcing to glacial ice volume were first articulated in 1864 by James Croll (1821-1890) and reinforced by Milutin Milankovitch in 1941. "

That's a lot of mumbo-jumbo, I know. What it means is....(drum roll, please) Sometimes the Earth is closer to the sun during its' orbit, which makes it seem a little hotter. Sometimes the Earth is farther away from the sun at certain points in its' orbit, so it seems a little colder. But what, folks, that's not the best part! The best part is, there were probably about 2000 scientists who agreed with this hypothesis back in 1941! Yeah, and I'll bet you could find a hundred more theories supported by 2000 more scientists, talk about a consensus! Just one thing, though, folks...science isn't consensus. Science is fact. If you and I agree that the world is flat, that doesn't make it so. You need proof, which no one has, just evidence, and I think we can all remember what Mr. Barnum said about that.

There must be something in human nature that makes us all wish we were living in a real-life, doomsday, end-of-times movie, because we keep doing this to ourselves. Remember Haley's Comet? Remember global cooling? Remember the o-zone? Remember Y2K? It must be that innate part of ourselves that needs to think we're heroes, that we're saving someone or something. I don't know. I've discovered, as Billy Joel once sang in The Angry Young Man, "that surviving is a noble fight. I once believed in causes, too, had my pointless point of view, and life went on no matter who was wrong or right." Sage words, Bill.

So look, here's my plan. Let's pay a bunch of scientists to aver that leprechauns are responsible for depleting the wetlands around Louisiana. Get enough of them to say it, and maybe Katie Couric will pick up on it. Then we'll have people all over the world begging congress to do something about the leprechauns. If enough people believe it, it'll be true, right? Just one question...after we solve that question, what should we do with the other two wishes?