The VENT

Originally Posted: September 27, 2007

I never did watch “An Inconvenient Truth”, but tonight I actually did sit through a documentary on Global Warming on CBC called ‘Everything’s Cool’. The reason I could not watch Al Gore is not that I’ve been a skeptic of his for 20 years, and let’s get this clear … I am not a Global Warming denier, I am a skeptic about the degree of mankind’s involvement in the climatic changes over the last 100 years, 200 years, millennia. I could not watch Al Gore’s adventurous reading of the facts because I know what it is like to live on an obscenely large lot in an obscenely large house in a part of the world where when you walk out of your obscenely cheaply air conditioned house, it feels like a sauna four months of the year. Knowing he lived in the place where one supplier said was ‘the best place in North America to retire and live like a king’ made me skeptical about his vantage point to say the least. If your 60 and looking for a good place to retire, forget Arizona, think Tennessee.

So forget Exxon being the problem with the US lagging the religious constraint of Europeans, think Tennessee Valley Authority … the TVA. Those wonderful people who dammed up everything in sight in the Southeastern US and then built Nukes not because they needed them, but to stabilize the grid. The people who brought us the ‘flood scene’ in “O Brother, Where Art Thou”. Hell, if they were running the electrical grid in the Peace Region, we’d not only have the Wacky Bennet Dam, but a string of them until the flats of Fort Vermillion and a Nuke in Grimshaw as well (apologies to those who actually read this and are from elsewhere). And we’d be using ‘hydro’ to heat our homes.

Anyway, for a few years now I have given up on the New Left, and the hijacked environmental movement to create any entertainment in destroying ‘market capitalism’. It’s too late. Twenty years ago, when envy was excused as righteousness, I was worried when Rio reared its head and global warming, soon to become climate change became the cause celeb. But now there are actually some answers to the question of reduced energy use and mankind in general is now ‘middle class’. Now, Rio and Kyoto sound like the echo of some crazy person talking to themselves on the bus …

In retrospect, I still wonder how statistical modeling, whether ‘multiple variable linear regression’ (described as ‘unit weighted regressions’ in wiki) or other methods could be taken as scientific evidence by so many people. I had a friend who worked with these concepts and it is definitely not a ‘first principles’ type of understanding of anything. It is still statistics. So while a chemical reaction was discovered for the break down of Atmospheric Ozone by certain CFC’s, no such primary causality exists for ‘Climate Change’ or for ‘Global Warming’ if your that convinced of the direction. However, that is just a curiosity now since it doesn’t matter.

I know both sides (there is only one side for some) of the argument adnauseum but am not worried about my children’s future. I do have to admit among the screaming I happened to see this documentary on why the sea levels weren’t rising and how Antarctica was changing and it did freak me out a little. But like the two edged sword in the information of the scientist who found evidence the last ice age may have started in a decade after a period of warming … few want to touch the information unless they can turn it into a silly movie.

The fact is that there is nobody out there who can say what kind of climatic trend we are in. From what I see everyone is fudging the data to tell a story and by the very nature of its statistical analysis, that’s exactly what it is … a story.

So that brings me to the final reason I no longer participate in this debate. It may be too late for the remnants of the ‘new left’/environmental movement to exact a cost on our existence, but at this point they can create positive change (and help ‘market capitalism’ adapt). Anybody who can get Al Gore to feel guilty about his property in Tennessee has got to be doing some good. It is absolutely obscene the ‘footprint’ many Americans leave on this world whether you look at it economically, financially, or environmentally. When the Chinese stop giving them money so they can give them stuff, and the rest of the world stops lending them money for nothing, and Wall Street is forced to look for value instead of some place to dump the cash in the US … that will be a good day for everyone. Then the Al Gore’s of the world will live much more modestly like their forefathers. So ‘Go Green’!

len