podpolia

This morning I read a post on Power Line about global warming, and scientists who have major problems with the “generally accepted” view put forward by the likes of Al Gore. I agreed with most of it, and didn’t think much more about it until this afternoon while I was doing some research in the SU Library and came across an editorial in the New York Times from the Saturday, January 6, 1883 edition. I quote it here in its entirety (with a couple of links added for explanation):

“THE ATMOSPHERE.
It has been supposed that we had a right to congratulate ourselves and feel comparatively safe on learning that the comet which was to smash us has postponed that operation for nearly 200,000 years. The safety of the earth from assault and battery by a comet is, however, of little consequence, provided mankind is to perish before that disaster takes place. That we are to so perish has been clearly shown by a writer in Nature, who has demonstrated that we shall all be poisoned and suffocated in the year 1900.
Every one must perceive that the growth of civilization and the increase of the number of civilized human beings is intimately connected with smoke. The first point of difference between the beast and the man is that the latter can build a fire. He does build many fires, and the more civilized he becomes the more fires he builds. Now, the process of combustion develops a variety of noxious gases, among which may be particularly mentioned carbonic dioxide, a gas that is produced in large quantities by the combustion of coal. Just in proportion as man becomes civilized he burns coal, and we might define a civilized man as a coal-burning animal, while the savage man is only a wood-burning animal. The increase every year in the number of tons of coal that are burned on land and sea is something enormous. Every new manufacturing enterprise, every new commercial enterprise, and every new house that is built involves an increased consumption of coal. MALTHUS used to say that while mankind increased in a geometrical ratio, the food on which he lives increases only in an arithmetical ratio, and hence will in time be insufficient for him. Were MALTHUS alive now he would take great pleasure in asserting that the combustion of coal increases twice as rapidly as the human race, and that there is every reason to believe that the rate of combustion will before very long be still greater than it now is. When we reflect that all the gases given off by burning coal enter and contaminate the atmosphere, and that the latter is a constant quantity while the former is steadily increasing, we gain an idea of the danger which threatens us.
It must also be remembered that the population of the globe increases the amount of carbonic acid gas given off by the lungs of human beings is increasing. The population of the civilized world has at least doubled within historic times, while the population of savage regions has probably not decreased. The time must come, provided man lives long enough, when the atmosphere will everywhere be as unwholesome as the air of a crowded American rail-road car in Winter. We shall poison the air so that we cannot breathe it, and the tragedy of the Black Hole of Calcutta will be enacted all over the world.
Another source of the pollution of the atmosphere is the cigarette. A few years ago it was not smoked except by a few men of the Latin races; now it is smoked all over the world, and in constantly and enormously increasing quantities. The cigarette gives forth an immense volume of smoke in comparison with its size, and the deleterious gases existing in this smoke are scattered through the atmosphere to the destruction of animal and vegetable health.
Anyone familiar with the statistics as to the amount of coal and tobacco annually burned and the quantity of carbonic acid gas annually set free by the lungs of human beings can readily calculate the exact quantity of deleterious gases that pass into the atmosphere. Of this entire quantity a certain proportion is washed out of the air by rains. This is, however, a fixed quantity, while the quantity of gases that pass into the atmosphere is a growing quantity. The annual rain-fall is very nearly invariable, and, of course, can only do a certain amount of work in cleansing the atmosphere, and the time will come when this cleansing effect will be so slight in comparison with the noxious elements present in the atmosphere that it will hardly be worth noticing. The writer who has partially discussed this subject in the columns of Nature has fixed upon 1900 as the date when the earth’s atmosphere will become entirely irrespirable. This is probably a misprint, for unless the consumption of cigarettes increases with unlooked-for rapidity the atmosphere ought to continue to be respirable until 1910, or even 1912.
At the latter date all mankind will have perished, and nothing except the hardier plants will be living on the surface of the earth. This will enable us to view with some little equanimity another consequence of the pollution of the atmosphere which the writer in Nature forgot to mention. Immense quantities of hydrogen are daily set loose by the combustion of coal and other substances, and the rains have no effect in cleansing the atmosphere of this particular gas. Now, hydrogen has a wonderful capacity for absorbing and radiating heat. Hence, when the atmosphere becomes loaded with hydrogen our climate will be greatly affected. The arctic regions will become far colder than they ever have been, and the torrid regions will become so hot as to be almost uninhabitable. A little further increase in the quantity of hydrogen in the atmosphere will render it explosive, and the first meteorite which enters the atmosphere will cause an explosion that will leave the earth scorched, blackened, and airless. It is thus seen that after all it is of very little consequence whether the comet hits us in the year 19300 or misses us again. We shall be choked with noxious gases and afterward blown up with hydrogen long before that date. Such is the pleasant prospect which science offers us, and who is there that will not love and reverence science more than ever for her wonderful prophetic powers?”

Most of my problems with the dire warnings we receive about global warming are quite evident in this article. We really don’t know enough of the science behind these things to go about claiming complete knowledge.

It seems like I’ve been doing a lot of videos lately, and like several others, this one comes from LGF. I will warn you: this movie is hard to watch. The injustice and vicious cruelty in the movie (which is a BBC2 documentary) are sickening. This is the sort of thing that makes me wish we could just overthrow the Iranian government and be done with it.

UPDATE 8/29/06 10.45PM: …and today we find out that Iran is cracking down on female dress. After watching this video, it makes me worry about the safety of many, many more Iranian women.

Unsuprisingly for anyone who follows the sorts of things that the UN does, the UN force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) regularly posted Israeli troop positions and other vital military information. Charles at LGF includes a link to UNIFIL’s press releases that contained the information. I’m somewhat suprised that Israel didn’t demand that they stop publishing the information, but of course every time Israel tries to get fair treatment from the UN, they seem to receive a diplomatic black eye due to biased reporting and anti-Israeli bias at the UN.

I’m quite amused by the Op Ed piece here from the Boston Herald (link courtesy of a certain Congressional staffer’s IM away message). While some people’s sensibilities may be shocked by this sort of thing, I simply see it as Bush blowing off steam (!). If I wanted to make Bush out to be really clever, I could attribute it to his appreciation of the dual and contradictory natures of President qua powerful leader versus President qua normal human being. It’s possible that that IS at the root of this sort of thing, but more likely it’s an unconcious manifestation of this apparent social oxymoron.
Reading this also makes me wonder if there is a difference in how Democrats and Republicans view this sort of thing from the ‘leader of the free world.’ Are Democrats (with their larger conception of what the power of the President should be) more likely to frown on seemingly ‘unpresidential’ behavior like this? You wouldn’t want someone you wanted to give a huge amount of power to to behave in a way that suggested that he was a fallible human being. Of course, the danger of that would be that you could lose sight of the fact that the President was indeed human and fallible, and likely to screw things up sometimes. Anyway, I will leave the topic open for anyone who wants to comment on the whole ‘idealization and idolization of political leaders in a democracy’ topic. Or, you could just leave fart jokes.

The UK Daily Mail has an interesting piece here about Ahmadinejad and the more unnerving aspects of his motivations and relationships with the west. At the moment, I believe Ahmadinejad is the biggest threat to world peace that we have. Hopefully the youth of Iran (there is a section in the article about them too) would rise up if he did something REALLY stupid, but by then it might be too late.

Well, it seems that I’m developing a thing for the videos that Charles at LGF posts. Once again, I’m snitching the code for this video from this post, since Charles is a genius webmaster, and I have trouble remembering to close html tags. Anyway, the video is interesting, if a bit long, and worth the watch.