Bill McKibben on the Global Warming
Jul
3, 2012 4:45 AM EDT
We can now admit it: global climate change is one big hoax. But
let’s give credit to the special effects experts who have given us wildfires,
downpour, and record heat this past month writes Bill McKibben.
Please don’t sweat the
2,132 new high temperature marks in June—remember, climate change is a hoax.
The first to figure this out was Oklahoma Senator James Inhofe, who in fact
called it “the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people,”
apparently topping even the staged moon landing. But others have been catching
on. Speaker of the House John Boehner pointed out that the idea that carbon
dioxide is “harmful to the environment is almost comical.” The always cautious
Mitt Romney scoffed at any damage too: “Scientists will figure that out ten,
twenty, fifty years from now,” he said during the primaries.
Consider the last few weeks. Someone turned on
the rain machine up in Duluth, Minnesota, where they broke all their old
rainfall records (and in an excellent cinematic touch flooded the city zoo with
so much water that the seal escaped and swam down the road. You can make this stuff up). And when that was over,
the production team hastened to the Gulf of Mexico, turning on the giant fans
to conjure up Tropical Storm Debby—the earliest fourth storm of the season ever
recorded, which dumped “unthinkable amounts of rain” on central Florida.
(Giveaway movie moment: the nine-foot gator that washed into a Tampa swimming
pool).
The
special effects guys were doing their best in Colorado: first they cranked up
the heat, setting a new state record at 115 degrees. And then came the fire
stunts! They looked real enough—one Waldo Canyon resident wrote a
harrowing account of driving his SUV across soccer fields to escape the blaze,
with “a vision of hell in his rearview mirror.” But there were giveaways it was
all faked: for one, the “flames” perfectly framed the famous chapel of the Air
Force Academy, and on the very day the new cadets arrived. And really, the
producers took it a bit too far: they staged a firestorm near the Boulder
campus of the National Center for Atmospheric Research, forcing the evacuation
of the planet’s foremost climate scientists. I mean, c’mon.
It’s amazing what you
can do with CGI these days. As a “giant heat wave” moved east across the
nation, heat records that dated back to the Dust Bowl fell with uncanny speed.
Images of the farmer kicking the dust in his drought-ridden field—that old
Hollywood staple—reappeared on the evening news; the scene worked so well that
the price of corn and wheat shot through the roof.
An
absurd number of catastrophes kept happening at the same time, just like in the
best disaster films. On Friday, for instance, Washington set all-time heat
records (one observer described it as like “being in a giant wet mouth, except
six degrees warmer”), and then shortly after dinner a storm for the ages blew
through—first there was five minutes of high wind, blowing dust and debris (and
tumbleweeds? surely some tumbleweeds), followed by an explosive display of
thunder and lightning that left millions without power.
Hoaxes require verisimilitude to make sure
everyone’s taken in. So it was necessary to make sure that Arctic sea ice is
melting ahead of the record pace set in 2007, and wildfires are burning
out of control across Siberia, and there is massive flooding n British
Columbia, and…We’ll see what bizarreness next week brings….
Peter’s Comment
The special effects
team has certainly been working overtime. But Bill McKibben only tells of half
their work.
Down here in the
Southern Hemisphere we are having near record low temperatures. It is so cold
as I type that my fingers are almost sticking to the keys. For the last two
winters we have had snow where it has never been seen before within living
memory.
People are asking, “What’s
happened to Global Warming?”
Now I’ll be able to
tell them about Bill McKibben’s discovery of the tie-up between climate change
and special effects.
The special effects
team must be getting a bit long in the tooth now because they’ve been on the
job for at least a hundred years. You see the hottest temperature ever recorded
in the world was a heart-stopping 136.0°F (57.8°C) in Libya in 1922.
Now if it wasn’t for
the special effects used in 1922 we would be led to believe that the world is
cooler 90 years after Libya. Perhaps it is getting cooler. The lowest
temperature ever recorded anywhere in the world was recorded as a spine-zapping
-128.6°F (-89.2°C) in 1983 at Vostok, Antarctica.
The global warming
alarmists tell us that as the planet heats up the storms get wilder. Let’s have
another look at what the special effects team has been up to.
The strongest wind gust
ever recorded was at Mount Washington, USA, and it measured 231 miles per hour
(372 kilometers per hour) in 1934. I guess the special effects team was younger
and fitter in those days and therefore better able to pump up the bellows. We
had a whole stretch last week with no wind at all so perhaps the team is about
to die of old age.
Tornados, we are told,
are getting more and more devastating as the climate warms. If so, do we blame
special effects for the fact that the US Tri-state Tornado of 1925 killed 695
people and all subsequent twisters have killed fewer people in spite of
increased population?
And what of floods,
the most devastating of all natural disasters? In the last hundred years the
world population has grown from under two billion to more than seven billion now
and the largest increase has been on the plains and along river banks.
The worst ever flood
in recorded history struck Huang He (Yellow River), China, in 1931 when an
estimated 1,000,000 to 3,700,000 people died. Even special effects would have
struggled to find enough extras for that one.
I believe that the
above events tell us that the world is neither safer, nor less less safe, than
before and that climate change talk is alarmist only. We should all get on with
our lives and make the most of the best quality of life in the history of the
mankind.
