e've all heard the tone of voice doctors use when they say things like
“I'm sorry to tell you you have something called the ‘Red Death’ and you
have only two weeks to live!” Well, now everybody talks like that.
First it was the lawnmower repair guy. After weeks of silence, I pictured my lawnmower in pieces, with two guys looking at it saying “Reckon that feller's gonna have to buy a new one...” Finally I got The Call. The guy sounded gloomy. “Weren't nothin' wrong with it.”
Then yesterday I got The Call from my car mechanic. “I have bad news about your car,” he said. I pictured it having turned into a heap of rusty parts after they torqued a single bolt; guys with face masks giving it Car Pulmonary Resuscitation, shaking their heads sadly as they take the paddles off the battery; or maybe wrapped top to bottom in a head gasket. The mechanic continued, sounding as if he was holding back tears: “We don't have the correct part and we'll have to order one from Auto Zone.”
Now, maybe he really was sad that he'd have to spend two and a half minutes on his crap computer, or maybe he had bad experience with those guys at Auto Zone. Or maybe he just couldn't stand the idea of looking at my rusty pile of junk another whole day. But my car survived. The guy told me he'd order the part and I should call back in a week to have it installed.
It's the opposite with global warmers. If it's summer, it must be climate change. And they're not sad about it at all. On the contrary: they manage to work it into any story that happens outdoors, including a forest fire happening, a tragic helicopter crash near Mount Everest, or a case of Crimean-Congo Hemorrhagic fever, which is about as close to Red Death as anything in the textbooks. To the press, a highway worker who dies of heatstroke is an exercise in trying to conceal their glee. Here's an actual sentence on that from a major newspaper:
The man, who has not been named, later died in hospital in a clear sign of the deadly effects of climate change.
That's your official notice: just as with Covid, all deaths from whatever cause will henceforth be attributed to global warming. They don't sound sorry one little bit when they say things like “The world will turn into a scorching desert in ten years and we're all going to die from malaria! A large bug was seen in the UK last week! Snow will be a thing of the past! And there was a flood in upstate New York!”
I have never seen people so happy about a computer-generated prophecy of impending doom. But what is their plan? If any rational person believed this and seriously wanted us to switch to electric vehicles, they'd be pushing for massive debureaucratification of nuclear power plants and subsidizing huge upgrades to the electric grid. We all know the grid is so finely balanced that it requires massive computers running massive differential equations day and night to keep it stable. Without them, a two percent increase in demand would cause a cascading failure that could destroy a transmission line hundreds of miles away. Doubling the demand, as electric cars would force us to do, would burn the grid to a crisp.
No, what this is really about is NIMBYism. They want to drive their own car to work and force everybody else to take the bus. And if the only way to do that is to create global famine by blocking out the sun, they'll just blame the “deniers” for forcing them to do it.
The point is that the humans express sadness when it affects them adversely and happiness when it doesn't. When the climate alarmists talk, their glee isn't just religious fervor; it's anticipation.
As one character in some children's movie says to another, “You're gonna suffer, but you're gonna be happy about it.”
According to Newton's First Law (named after Charlie Newton, the guy who works over at CVS), for every catastrophist there's an equal and opposite contrarian. It's a full time job for our contrarians to keep up with the cascade of hyperbole and wishful fantasy from the press, and not all are up to the task. Some say CO2 is too low to have an effect when the theory clearly says scattering from carbon dioxide is nearly saturated at 400 ppm. Others say yes, okay, the climate is warming, but we'll adapt. Or they'll be in denial like my car mechanic, who said that the oil companies are so powerful they'll never allow electric cars to take over.
Rule #1 in economics is: people adapt to what they see coming, thereby rendering it ineffective. That is why it's nearly impossible to win by gambling on the stock market: by the time the average person hears about an opportunity, it has already been neutralized. I passed on buying a smaller house last month because it was forty miles from the nearest grocery store. If the government taxed the price of gas up to thirty bucks a gallon, it would cost me $96 more each time I bought groceries. I'd have to buy them over the Internet. It's also why I'm spending a fortune keeping my twenty-one-year-old rust bucket alive. In the winter, an electric car would never survive the trip.
Thirty dollars a gallon is what gasoline will cost when the oil refineries and gas stations go out of business. That's assuming you can get it shipped to you.
Most of my friends are scientists and doctors. They fall into three camps:
Those who get brownie points from calling God a ‘she’.
Those who change the subject because they work for the DoD and they're afraid of being sent to Leavenworth.
Those who are skeptical but afraid to speak out. This seems to be the majority of those I have spoken to.
If any scientist does speak out, they'll be blacklisted from publishing, their peer-reviewers will snark on their grants, they'll be smeared and lied about in the press, and the bureaucrats who infest academia will force them out of their jobs, tenure or not. If the warmers wanted to convince us, they'd have to give scientists back their freedom of speech.
As for my car, when I called back a week later about the ordered part, the mechanic had no idea what I was talking about. That is SOP these days, not just for car mechanics but for government bureaucrats. Promises about the future never obligate them to do anything. I've become convinced that the only people who actually believe what they say are the ones who remain silent.
jul 13 2023, 5:16 am. updated jul 21 2023, 4:21 am
