Oh Really?

Look, there’s no disputing that Madonna is the consummate music-video artist of our time.

Justin Ravitz

Oh, just watch me dispute. I have to say I’ve never understood the whole Madonna thing. She’s an average physical performer, with a serviceable singing voice and a modest talent for camp that Cher could wear as a pinkie ring. Her lyrics are proof of Voltaire’s famous maxim “That which is too stupid to be spoken is sung”  and her success as a performer is proof of that other famous maxim: “There’s a sucker born every minute”.

Ok, It’s Settled. The Consensus is Unanimous, the Science is In.

We’re heading for a new ice age. There can be no doubt. The science has been done. Only people who are inherently EVIL would even want to debate the issue.

Just kidding – sort of. Actually, we’re in an ice age right now, enjoying one of those occasional 10,000 year long interglacial warming periods, except ours is about 1000 years overdue to end. When I see time lapse movies of retreating glaciers, I’m filled with dread, not necessarily because I’m worried about global warming, but because they look to me more than anything like the sharp in-drawing of breath before a catastrophic scream of icy fury.

The article asserts that if we were to slip into a full-blown glacial era, “millions” would starve. Ummm, try billions. We’ve survived many glacial periods in the past of course, but we’ve come close to getting knocked out of the ring by them on more than one occasion. Geneticists estimate that around 20,000 years ago, there were as little as 20,000 of us – on the entire planet.

With that horrible modern technology that we’re not supposed to look to for answers, I figure maybe a billion or so could survive the 100,000 year-or-longer freeze, huddled around the equator and the lower temperate zones. That may be a wildly overoptimistic estimate – we really have no way of knowing how we’d cope. But it would be the ultimate irony if all our carbon emissions over the last two hundred years have only served to forestall a glacial age anxious to get on about its business of flattening mountain ranges and smothering whole continents.

It’s Not that I’m a Global Warming Skeptic…

It’s that I’m skeptical of the reasons some pundits and political blogger windbags are suddenly so passionate about global warming and climate change. If your only reason for talking about the issue is to show how evil and stupid the mean Republicans or the America-hating Liberals are, then I would think it’s fair to say that you’re not really interested in environmental issues at all. You’re just interested in defaming people you happen to not like. Can you really not see how there’s a difference?

I also see a lot of opportunistic ideologues looking to use climate issues as an excuse to resurrect ancient gender or ethnic grievances, dust off the moldering corpses of international socialism and elitist visions of world government, or to promote their absurd, meaningless and utterly unenforceable “carbon offset” schemes. I’m not buying any of it. I’m only interested in people who are talking about global warming and climate change as engineering challenges that will be solved by engineers, not by tearing down capitalism, or by asking the developing world to voluntarily retreat backwards into pre-industrial poverty, or by asking the entire population of the planet earth to surrender their basic human rights and freedoms for the “greater good”.  

“Shortage” Can Mean Many Things…

It’s worth remembering that even accounting for droughts and increased demand, the price of basic food commodities isn’t just going up. It’s being driven up. By people who in my opinion, should be lined up against a wall and shot.