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On and About the Proper Use of Hysterics
I suppose that it should be mentioned that the root of the word hysteria is the Greek 'hysterikos'. It's root meaning is, 'suffering in the womb'. The connection between hysteric behavior, and the absence of same after a hysterectomy, is not casual, rather causal. Just so we're clear what we're talking about here.
Now some seem to claim that, while all the data may not be in, we must act now to save Mother Earth. This is the usual clapdoodle that I found so unsuccessful while in my twenties in trying to talk nubile maidens into my bed. "We must act now." And, as admitted above, the route to government action, for there can be no other-right?, is through hysteria. If we don't act now the only alternative will be to scramble the Canadian Naval Fleet to rescue the polar bears by vert-reping pallets of aloe vera. Given that the colossus of the sea consists of a couple of ice-breakers somewhere around the Mackinaw Strait, global action will be required.
Let's review some past hysterikos.
Back in the seventies Paul Ehrlich was induced to betting the late Julian Simon that, in ten years, crucial minerals would either be exhausted or the price exhorbitant. Simon was so convinced that he was right that he bet Ehrlich $10,000 that the known reserves of any ten minerals would be greater in ten years and the price would be lower for them. And he let Ehrlich pick the minerals. Ehrlich lost the bet, although the media were off to some new crisis by the time Ehrlich paid up.
Science told us cyclamates were harmful and we banned them. Turns out you have to drink a bath-tub a day to cause cancer. but they are gone.
Acid rain was a crisis. The US government spent over $500 million studying it, more than enough to add enough lime to every low pH lake in North America to neutralize them. The fact that the most acidic lakes were found in Florida, that hemoglobin pumper of heavy industry, and those lakes were acidic 500 years ago, seemed not to matter. Have we solved the problem of acid rain, or did it never exist in the first place?
The energy crisis of the seventies produced massive government programs for extraction of oil from shale. How much oil from shale do we produce today? Zero. Nada. Bupkis. Where do the proven reserves of oil stand today? In excess of where they were in the seventies. The US alone is virtually awash in oil. Is that news? There is oil, in large quantities, off both coasts of Florida, the coast of California, a recent new strike in the Gulf of Mexico, as well as the Alaskan wilderness. Now we are not pumping that oil, hell we're not even drilling for it, bit that doesn't mean it isn't there. But it is still claimed, and entering it's third decade, we are running out. The crisis continues.
Of course, back in the seventies we were concerned about that oil because we were going to need it to keep warm. The planet was cooling rapidly and a new ice age was to be soon upon us. Every, and I mean every, news magazine was filled with the news of global cooling. I forget exactly how western democracy was responsible for it occuring, but I am sure it was.
Then we had the banning of DDT. Ralph Nader is calling for it's re-introduction. Did you miss that one? Turns out the "science" showing bird's egg shells thinning out due to DDT was junk. The scientists had also reduced the bird's calcium intake, and when that was restored, even with the DDT, the shells were normal. Too late to stop the banning of DDT. btw, DDT lasts approximately 38 days, after that the DDT and it's metabolites disappear, on the order of 92%. Meanwhile malaria kills over a million people a year in Africa. The ban continues. Some might call that racist. I wouldn't use such lofty language. Stupid will do.
Then science told us of the very real threat of Nuclear Winter. That's the movie that came out before Al Gore invented the internet and became a movie producer. Carl Sagan was relentless in his desire to eliminate nuclear weapons, and nuclear power, for fear of a snowy planet. The fall-out from nuclear war would blacken the skies and cause massive temperature degradation. Professor Saddam Hussein conducted the most far-reaching study in the field in the early nineties when he lit the oil fields of Kuwait on fire blackening the skies of the entire region. Temperatures dropped not an iota. You can probably pick up the 'winter' rally shirts on e-bay cheap about now. btw, what did we do with all those nuclear weapons that never got detonated? We used their threat, in part, to bankrupt one of the cruelest regimes to darken the twentieth century and, in the process, removed the threat of another world war from European concern.
Science, and the US govenment, declared war on cancer in 1970, with the goal of irradicating it by 1976. Cancer death rates remain essentially the same as in 1970. In fact, they are about the same as in 1950. The National Cancer Institute's budget was $800 million in 1976. Today it is $5 billion. The pharmeceuticals are spending $6 billion a year looking for the cancer gene. Is it possible that it is not genetic in origin? We'll never know at this rate, there's too much money available for researching the cancer gene.
How about species extinction. Always a hot topic on Sesame Street and NPR. Older textbooks instructed that 99% of species were extinct before man even appeared. Today the number of new species being found and identified far exceeds the number becoming extinct. The flat truth is that we have no idea of how many species actually exist on the earth. But we're finding more. In the last twenty years the number of known mammal species has increased by twenty five per cent.
The environmental branches of science would have us believe many things, many of them flat out wrong. A simple one. "Paper or plastic?" Plastic costs less to produce, ship, and store than paper. Just the delivery alone is instructive. You can fit alot more plastic bags in a container than you can paper, something on the order of 100 times. So we need 100 more trucks to deliver paper bags that one truck carrying plastics can deliver. Those trucks burn oil, alot more oil than it takes to make plastic bags. But paper bags are bio-degradable! Yes they are, but no they are not. Current land-fill practise, and even ordinance, calls for the covering of each layer of trash with earth on the same day it is dumped. Trash is not left to rot, as in the past. Deprived of oxygen, paper does not break down very well. In fact, you can dig up a newspaper from ten years ago and read it as new. Plastics, on the other hand, take up about a one hundredth of the space that their paper brethern do. They compact quite nicely. So which is more environmentally sound; filling up landfills quickly with paper or slowly with plastic?
So there's a brief history of science and environmentalism as we know it. And now you want us to believe the same caterwaulers, who've been selling us a bill of goods for thirty years, about climate change. And, by the way, the action you wish us to take would decimate the world economy and, most especially, the world's poor. I recognize the hysteria. I've been listening to it for most of my adult life. It's worse than Muzak. But you are on the right path. You must create hysteria, or my favorite-"crisis", for action to be taken. And that means big government action. And who benefits from big government action? Well, for one, all those polar bear census-takers. I mean, where else are these people going to get a job? A guy comes down to the boat-yard looking for a job and is asked about previous employment. "Spent two years counting polar bears" Some of you, with less than satisfactory osmotic blistering repairs may have had this guy working on your boat! Not really though, these people can only be employed by the govenment or private foundations. Those are the only two institutions stupid enough to employ them in their chosen profession. These lilliputians have proven remarkably adaptable too. Consider, oh please consider, if we put global warming on the back burner, they will merely mutate into new harbingers of the next crisis. This is not about science. This is about politics, money, and power. You could not find a group of people less interested in real science. This is a moral and political cause conferring on it's adherents a moral clarity and moral superiority not to be attained by your local waste hauler. Sign me up for the "Burn, Baby, Burn" rally. I've already got the tee shirt.
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