Requiem for global warming

ne commentator called Greta Thunberg, who has now turned twenty-one, the “pint-size predictor of end times.” Well, that one is a kid no more, so now we're allowed to say what we really think of her ideas.

But what are they? From the news reports, all we heard was emotionalism, as if someone had told her there was a life-ending crisis and she believed it. Who would say such a thing to a child? Why would the child not consider that they might be taking advantage of her naivete for their own purposes? Having Asperger's is not an excuse. Millions of others have this condition, but manage to compensate for it.

Nowadays, even little kids know the legacy media can't be trusted, which may be why they get their news from TikTok instead of the newspaper. TikTok, of course, can't be trusted either, but these days none of us has a choice. If you want the truth, you must discover it for yourself. Nothing anyone tells you can be believed. The more they nag, the more you should doubt.

All that cell phone scrolling has given us a smorgasbord of new health crises: an epidemic of vertigo, cyber­sick­ness ^[1], dizziness, oculomotor dysfunction^[2] as measured by postural swaying and loss of static balance, and acute acquired comitant esotropia^[3], commonly known as being cross-eyed, caused by endless hours watching things scrolling up. Smartphones are also associated with psychological distress^[4,5], belief in conspiracy theories^[6], and especially anxiety^[7,8,9,10].

Ages ago, when I was a kid in the age of CRTs, doctors warned against sitting too close to a TV for fear that it might be emitting X-rays. Being rather annoyingly Aspergery myself, I made several measurements around a color TV with a radiation detector but could find no trace of any ionizing radiation. What I found instead was the static charge on the screen (an interesting effect that kids today are missing out on) interfered with the electronics in the detector.

I wondered if perhaps this was what those doctors were measuring. The similarity between CRTs and X ray machines, both of which used beams of electrons impacting a metal target, made the X-ray theory plausible, but as always the question isn't whether it's there—make your detector sensitive enough and you can find anything—but how important it is; and what things you don't know that could explain it better.

The X-ray issue was rendered moot by incorporation of leaded glass and lower voltages and by their replacement with cheaper LCD and LED displays. But tell people that thunderstorms produce antimatter and they'll panic. Today we have panic about the ozone layer, forever chemicals, acid rain, Covid, 5G radio waves, and radon. But as with everything else, it's not whether it exists but whether it's a problem. Emotion won't answer the question and neither will blind obedience.

Most people have figured out that the goal of science often is not to solve problems but to identify as many new problems as possible (or, in some cases, create new ones) in order to get more grants. Risk-benefit analysis is always somebody else's job.

Anyway, I've changed my mind about global warming. Look at the evidence: autonomous vacuum cleaners trying to suck up dogs, the UK experiencing −6°C temperatures, well below the temperature for dangerously icy roads, −50°F in the US midwest, people gluing themselves to stationary objects, and . . . other stuff . . . . What more proof do you want?

What these children represented was the infantry, in its original meaning, of the class wars. The idea was that a display of strong emotion meant they were really sincere, because why else would they be so upset? Alas, the world doesn't work that way. Our strongest emotions are but a gnat's bad breath to the universe.

Give me back the old days when the traditional religions were the ones censoring things and telling us the world was going to end in fire. Thanks to the no-longer-kid and all the other lefty fanatics, those of us who grew up to be skeptical of religions are getting terminal whiplash. And that is just one more thing we can blame on cell phones.

jan 07 2024, 4:54 am