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Friday, May 2, 2014

Let's Fix The Motor Before We Buy New Tires

I recently spoke with a friend who was invited as the local fire chief to attend a meeting in Washington, D.C. of the Federal government’s Climate Change group (not sure why they needed a fire chief there?)  They have appointed a federal judge to “weigh the evidence” as chairperson of this committee.  Now, I don’t know what all the climate science is, but apparently the feeling is the scientists created climate change models that have turned out to be way less dramatic than the real thing. 

My questions are basically: Is the climate changing faster because the scientific modeling was based on faulty assumptions?  Is it changing faster because we don’t really know all the dynamics of what causes climate change in the atmosphere and in outer space and perhaps that changes randomly?  Or, has man been polluting the atmosphere faster than anticipated?

To be honest, I don’t think any of it means a heck of a lot.

The real issue, as Paul Ehrlich wrote about some 40 years ago, is that population is the real problem (I realize all his predictions were not completely accurate either.)  More people make more greenhouse gases...and they do a lot of other nasty stuff, like eat.  The planet has a finite capability to support only a certain number of folks.  The dynamics of global climate change have been going on without man’s help for millions of years, population on the other hand is entirely at mankind’s command.

There are nearly two billion more people on the planet than there were when Ehrlich wrote the Population Bomb.  In the future, there will be two billion more in half the time since he wrote his book.  It seems to me what we are doing is akin to the person who has a car with a blown engine and seriously worn tires, who decides his first priority is to get new tires to “fix” the car.


The thing that will fix mother earth is curbing the increase in population…either that, or we are going to have to start shipping folks off to Mars.

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