The Dishwasher Gets All Political up on Climate Change

3/1/2010 9:20 AM – 9:41 AM

This morning was a day of a very unquiet mind. I spent yesterday doing nothing that was needed. Surprisingly, I didn’t watch any TV. I watched 2012 with Ben-n-Amy last night, but that was it. In regards to that movie, it was stupid but fun. The Arks were cool.

The movie was a general End-of-the-World movie. As opposed to the preachy, If-Only-You-Weren’t-So-Greedy-and-Had-Only-Voted-for-More-Democrats End-of-the-World movie. I hate those. Here’s the thing, I’m not a denier but I’m not an alarmist. I think that Global Climate Change was and is an interesting phenomenon. I do think it’s real. I even think that mankind has had some effect on it. The problem with the freeze-all-economic-progress-or-we’ll-be-sorry Climate Change is one of depth of field. If we were to only judge the state of the climate based on a few of the last few months, we might see a cooling trend.

That’s wrong, of course. More data! More data! That should be the shout of the true scientist. So we pull the camera back and look at the last 100 years. Well, look at that, we’re warming, just as predicted. Pull it back a few thousand years and, oops, we’re still warming, we started long before the industrial revolution. Pull it back 125,000 years and we get a picture of a valley, of which we’re crawling up the further side. Pull the camera back so that we can see the last 500,000 years and we see up and down, up and down, up and down, up and down. Where were the evil polluting factories 300,000 years ago? There weren’t any. Climate Change is still a new science. It doesn’t know why. Or maybe it does, but it doesn't know which. There are several theories as to why our planet has been going up and down, up and down for the last 500,000 years. The Hockey Stick portion of the graph is a very, very, very tiny part of it. If we had never come to be, the Hockey Stick probably wouldn’t be in the data. The global temperatures, however, would probably still be going up. The Centralized Command and Control Oligarchy lost the battle for the commanding heights to the stupid/wise emergent frenzy of the trading crowds. But the Oligarchy will not give up. They will merely seek new reasons to rule. It is their nature. And mine to oppose them. Stopping the End of the World is a pretty good reason. Even if they can’t actually do it.