Climate Change...The Feeding Frenzy

I have had several things to write but have not taken time of late…I wrote this on a tablet of paper that was not recycled. I did it to keep myself awake in a meeting on Climate Change…Let me explain.

I allowed myself to be sucked into attending the meeting in Lima because we felt that one of us should be there. I have to admit a certain perverse hope and a perceived opportunity to subvert, hassle and mock some of the true believers in this modern global fantasy. In truth, I am not a very nice guy when I get a whiff of idiots…

I cannot say that I was completely disappointed. Dubbed “Global Forum on Climate Change and Ecoefficient (newly invented word) Companies,” the event lacked planning, organization and execution. The presenters were pretty much mostly the boring droner types that get that white sticky phlegm in the corners of the mouth,. I found it somewhat challenging to get a good ridicule going because of the narcotic nature of the presentations. What happens to these people anyway? Some of their stuff was potentially interesting but they somehow turned it into virtual chloroform. One guy, next to me actually had his head cocked back and snored during one particularly exhilarating presentation.

Outside the hall, the Conservation International NGO exhibited a gallery of truly spectacular photos. They had great shots of native people in traditional dress. There were commensurate shots of billowing flames from cane fields and polar bears swimming for their lives with no place to get out of the water except of drippy ice flows, deforested Amazon soya fields and so forth. About 30% of the photos had a message directly related to the global warming boogey man. O woe is me!

There were two big photos of mud cracks and one has a little boy flying his kite from the cracked mud as though standing on dry cracky ground were a particular hardship. These are the same pictures that National Geographic has carried for the last 50 years, at least, but now they have become virtual symbols of global warming…

Let’s see if we can try to explain this. Shallow, dry desert lakes, called playa get rained on when big fluffy clouds rise up from evaporation and get heavy with moisture. Then the clouds bump together and make really big, noisy sparks and water, called r-r-rai-i-n falls out of them. That makes the playas soggy and even fill up to some depth with water. Then the big yellow object comes out and dries out and cracks the sticky stuff, forming mud cracks.

This information, though somewhat embellished is stuff I got on a grade school field trip on the back of the bus with Jerry Kelley and a couple of other big boys. I am not sure if it was meteorology on that trip or where puppies come from but in any case the diagrams were not all that different from the other and left much, to be desired and to the imagination.

The news here is that…this is not news or new. It happened in the Pleistocene, in the Jurassic and in the Permian. It has gone on in all of geologic history and since God made it rain on dry lake beds! Yikes! I mixed creationism with geology. Is that bad? I can think of people on both sides who will take exception to my offense. But I can’t ever remember what I am supposed to say and Julie gets mad at me in bookstores when i scoff loudly at books by say,,, Al Gore. But mud cracks happen and you don’t have to summon up the insipid specter of climate change to explain them.

Another of these photos and the most galling showed a Green Turtle (chelonian mydas) decomposing on the beach in Lambayeque, Peru. The little caption under the photo of the rotting reptile goes something like this, “The temperature of the oceans changes and marine species are very sensitive…” What??? Excuse me… Where is the connection in this photo between water temperature and the death of this magnificent animal? What evidence have we of this poor creature’s cause of death? The only thing I could rule out was a shark attack because it did not look like a forgotten mallowmar in a rest home with a chunk bitten out of it,.

How do we know that it died of warm water and not say that he/she was really full of turtle cancer? Maybe he just ran his wheels off and was 299 years old and died of old age. He could have been promiscuous and died bitter and angry of turtle STDs. Do we have any reason to think that he died of tepidity or indeed that it is harmful to turtles. I myself enjoy a nice warm soak now and again. Are we sure that the turtle was knocked off by a balmy bath. Maybe he just died in sheer ecstasy in the ½ degree increase in pacific water temperature off the coast of Lambayeque.

Now don’t misinterpret my position. I love nature and not just because it tastes good. I really want to see cool turtles (no pun intended) chugging along in the ocean and not convulsing and seething in the scalding waters off Northern Peru or any other coast for that matter. I like dolphins and even supposedly endangered owls and rhinos and gorillas. I like to go out into the woods and think the Amazon is quite something. I despise irresponsible miners and drug cultivators and so forth. I have a strong sense of social responsibility. But what galls me more than anything else is uninformed, pseudoscientific, inflammatory piffle-mongering. What is wrong with considering the evidence? Yet the promoters of this frenzy, couple pieces of information, misrepresent them and link them as science. Then they do their little Chicken Little dance; blame car exhaust, illegal miners and cow farts for turtles dropping dead and bobbing ashore in Lambayeque…Oh, yeah and hurricanes in the Gulf of Mexico too and mining causes malaria… I almost forgot. Pllllleeeaaasssse!