Armageddon approaches

The Doomsday Clock returns. Used for years by scientists to terrify the uneducated masses about the threat of nuclear war, it is being recycled to try and achieve the same effect with global warming. Apparently we aren’t panicking enough although some apparently are. I have posted previously on the poor people of Tuvali who believe in the new Book of Revelations and supposedly are sufficiently moved to panic at the correct scale and head for higher land.
This ideology has the Pacific Islanders reading the new Book of Revelations and demanding migration rights to Australia and New Zealand because their low lying islands are going to be swamped. It says so in the New bible. It would also be pretty cool to live in Australia with it’s social security and all but the islands aren’t about to be swamped. Scientists and other interested parties are argueing over whether the rise is .07mm a year or 5mm a year and even then king tides, natural sand redistribution, native attempts at building on the shoreline and the effects of cyclones must be factored in.
Back to Stephen Hawkin
CLIMATE change is as great a threat to the world as terrorism and nuclear war, cosmologist and mathematician Stephen Hawking said yesterday as the “doomsday clock” – a countdown to Armageddon that was begun by scientists in 1947 – was moved forward two minutes to stand at five minutes to midnight. Professor Hawking, of the University of Cambridge, said the twin dangers of global warming and nuclear proliferation needed to be tackled urgently. “Since Hiroshima and Nagasaki, no nuclear weapons have been used in war, though the world has come uncomfortably close to disaster on more than one occasion,” he said. “But for good luck, we would all be dead.”
It wasn’t ‘good luck’ that saved us; more Kennedy’s resolve and Kruschov’s rare moment of clarity but I guess that’s not within Hawkin’s narrow field of expertise. Armageddon, The Apocalypse, over population, the second coming of Jesus, Nuclear Winter and Global Warming are all a form of recycled religion and should be treated with a healthy dose of skepticism. I’ll believe us mere humans, present on this planet for a tiny period of it’s existance, have had the impact on her weather as is being suggested, a moment or two after someone speaks knowingly on long-period natural weather cycles. Or, prove to me that we are not enduring a slightly hotter period of a 10,000 year cycle that may or may not be caused by each planet’s proximity to it’s neighbour and the sun and her sunspot behaviour in some yet to be understood galaxy juggling. From MadSci Network
….there might be a connection between sunspots and climate on much longer time-scales. For example, from 1645 to 1715, the sunspot cycle turned off, and not one sunspot was visible during these years. During about the same time, the “Little Ice Age” happened, in which temperatures in Europe fell several degrees C. Again, correspondence doesn’t imply causation, but it’s something to think about.
If a scientist says ‘but it’s something to think about‘ he means he can’t disprove it; all of which goes to prove little other than we know too little. Time will tell but I have no immediate plans to sell out and move to the high country in some colder clime. UPDATE: In comments, Harry Buttle links to an article headed “The Sun Moves Climate Change“. An interesting read for those who are not yet signed up members of the Global Warming Church of the Latter Day Alarmists and are still open minded enough to read other potential gospels.

Global Warming High Priest writes gospel

The new ideology, Global Warming or, on a cold day Global Change, has a new disciple in Nicholas Stern. He is the flavour of the week as the ABC put him on a pedastal and treat his every word as gospel. Stern has called for urgent world action to cut greenhouse gases or face economic failure worse than the Great Depression. It puts the global cost of global warming and its effects at $9 trillion – a bill greater than the combined cost of the two world wars and the great depression and warns us that drought and floods could render swathes of the planet uninhabitable, creating the largest migration in history. He’s put ticks in more boxes than Chicken Little ever knew existed – it’s just a pity that the science seems to be based on questionable computer modelling. He says with a 4 degree warming Australian farmlands would be rendered useless. He could be right but entering “4 degree warming” in the text box of some software doesn’t actually increase the temperature. The fact that the rise in temperature over the past century has been in the order of 0.6C (plus or minus 0.2C) then we are looking at maybe 5 centuries before we have a problem; and that presumes that in all that time the human race couldn’t come up with an answer. They may even come up with a computer model that us sceptics can believe. This ideology has the Pacific Islanders reading the new Book of Revelations and demanding migration rights to Australia and New Zealand because their low lying islands are going to be swamped. It says so in the New bible. It would also be pretty cool to live in Australia with it’s social security and all but the islands aren’t about to be swamped. Scientists and other interested parties are argueing over whether the rise is .07mm a year or 5mm a year and even then king tides, natural sand redistribution, native attempts at building on the shoreline and the effects of cyclones must be factored in. Even if you believe the Chicken Littles and accept 5mm a year rise there is still no justification for causing panic amongst the locals. The next cyclone could reverse or exacerbate any sea rises and they’ve been blowing for millenia. I’m prepared to accept there is a problem and we need to be careful but the alarmist reporting prevelant today serves little purpose. Mother earth has weathered a lot in her time without the intervention of us puny humans and she will for a long time yet. Like all religions, I am pepared to study this new one but as usual I will not be taking every single word as gospell.

Buy Real Estate in the Arctic now

THE world has already passed the point of no return on global warming, and efforts to slow it may already be doomed, one of Britain’s best-known environmentalists says. Professor James Lovelock said billions would die by the end of the century, and civilisation as it is known would be unlikely to survive. Billions will be born and billions will die. That’s the cycle of life. Whether they die early because of global warming is another issue.
“The few breeding pairs of people that survive will be in the Arctic, where the climate remains tolerable,” Professor Lovelock wrote in the newspaper.
Must be depressing living with him.
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