Global Warming Is a Joke
At first sight, the case for global-warming hysteria seems air tight. If we continue to pump carbon dioxide into the air at a rate greater than the biosphere can handle, it's likely to warm up the globe a bit. There is the minor problem that we are extremely unlikely to continue using 19th-century technology of fossil fuels for long. In view of the relative harmlessness of nuclear fission, the only good reason to avoid it is that solar might be better. In either case, fossil fuels will be obsolete soon. I'm reminded of Mark Twain's extrapolation of the shortening of the Lower Mississippi:
In the space of one hundred and seventy-six years the Lower Mississippi has shortened itself two hundred and forty-two miles. That is an average of a trifle over one mile and a third per year. Therefore, any calm person, who is not blind or idiotic, can see that in the Old Oolitic Silurian Period, just a million years ago next November, the Lower Mississippi River was upwards of one million three hundred thousand miles long, and stuck out over the Gulf of Mexico like a fishing-rod. And by the same token any person can see that seven hundred and forty-two years from now the Lower Mississippi will be only a mile and three-quarters long, and Cairo and New Orleans will have joined their streets together, and be plodding comfortably along under a single mayor and a mutual board of aldermen. There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact.
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home