Rear Admiral John Kirby affirmed it. Yes, planet Earth’s days are numbered if the average global temperature rises more than 1.5 degrees Celsius. Climate change threatens “all life” on Earth. Hmmnnn…
He made the remark to Fox News and said that the President still believes climate change is an existential threat. “More than nuclear weapons?” asked the Fox anchor. Yeah, nods Kirby. "Climate change is an existential threat. It actually threatens and is capable of wiping out all human life on earth over time,” he said with a little smile that indicated he knew more than the rest of us.
What are you thinking? I know I’m saying to myself, “Are these the fools running the country? A slight temperature rise is more of a threat than a nuclear holocaust? Did they ever take a course, even an eighth grade course, in earth science? Have they never seen a documentary on the history of life from, or during any period since, its origin? We’re talking about 3.8 billion years, give or take a week.” Did they ever see pictures of Hiroshima and Nagasaki after they were bombed?
3,800,000,000 Years
Let’s put that Biden-Kirby view in the context of a dynamic Earth: Over the course of 4.56 billion years the planet’s surface has undergone multiple and enormous changes. It wasn’t until about 2.3 billion years ago that the atmosphere underwent the Great Oxidation Event that altered its composition from a mix of noxious gases to something resembling our nitrogen-oxygen-water vapor atmosphere with its minor components argon, carbon dioxide, and a few other gases. And if suspected evidence of early life’s first birth is correct, organisms have weathered some 3.8 billion years of those atmospheric and climate changes, first as unicellular critters and later as multicellular ones. Over the past 300 million years Pennsylvania, now lying at about 40 degrees north, moved from equatorial and tropical latitudes, and today’s hot South Africa moved northward from the Antarctic Circle, where it had lain for tens of millions of years. During a period called Snowball Earth, the planet was cold, very very very cold from poles to Equator, maybe so cold that only a few areas near the Equator were ice or slush free. That Snowball Earth, or cryogenic period, occurred prior to a warming during which unicellular life evolved to become multicellular life—the evolutionary path to us began to snowball itself toward you, Kirby, and Biden during a period of warming. That climatic change back about 650 million years ago, dwarfs the 1.5 degrees Celsius change that Kirby and Biden say is “existential” in nature. And yet, life survived—and thrived.
I’ll repeat. Life not only survived rapid and large temperature changes, but it thrived. It survived and thrived through numerous temperature changes—up and down.
And during the past three to seven or more million years, climate change, aka local warming, probably facilitated random evolution in turning primates into bipedal critters. If droughty conditions eliminate trees, then living in them is impossible. And such aridity appears to have occurred during and prior to Australopithecenes leaving footprints in volcanic ash. We left the trees for life on the savanna. We might be upright walkers because of climate change in eastern Africa. When he isn’t falling, Biden owes his upright stance to climate change. Amazing that Little Lucy mastered walking more than three million years ago while the most powerful man on the planet in the twenty-first century can’t handle a flight of stairs into Air Force One.
Two Kinds of Winter
Does Rear Admiral Kirby, who must have been privy to all the nuclear capabilities of the nuclear powers, think that relatively gradual climate change is a greater threat than nuclear war? He says so.
How did he miss the projections by Carl Sagan and others that “nuclear winter” would be more devastating a change than those three volcanic eruptons were in the ninetenth century, eruptions that led to the “Year without a Summer” in 1816? But nuclear war brings more than just a change in temperature as its dust blankets the planet and blocks sunlight; it brings radiation, long-lasting radiation. By the way, those projections of a nuclear winter are far more believable than those many failed projections of people like Al Gore and the ride-the-grant-money-as-long-as-it-pays-for-confrences-IPCC-scientists who have yet to devise a model that does anyting more than exaggerate and frighten; the predicted results of “climate change,” such as an ice-free Arctic Ocean, the widespread deaths of corals, the hurricane numbers, and a rapidly rising sea, have never materialized. The seas, which have been rising since the end of the last great ice advance, are rising at less than 3 mm per year—if that measurement is accurate. They might continue to rise as they have for the last 10,000 years; we might have to wait, however, for a millennium to see a one meter rise.
Existential Threat to All Life, John Kirby?
And, by the way, Earth underwent a large warming at the beginning of the Cenozoic, sometimes known as the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum. Since then, the planet has been cooling, and its atmospheric carbon has been declining with spikes in both temperature and carbon dioxide content—which, again by the way, can’t be shown to have a direct relationship or direct cause and effect relationship.
But Biden and Kirby will get their earth science knowledge from popular press reports and from anecdotal evidence like a couple of hot weeks in summer or an occasional hurricane that hits a population center. Every storm, every weather event in their minds amounts to proof that climate is changing—which, by yet another way, it has throughout those last 3.8 billion years. There’s no winning the argument with them: Every weather event is an indicator in their minds, even cold Arctic air spilling from Canada into the US.
Biological Warfare
Physical dangers like nuclear blasts and radiation are serious threats to human life. But what of biological threats? Have Kirby and Biden forgotten the recent pandemic? Biden has received about a thousand vaccinations, so I assume he knows that a biological weapon is an existential threat. Yet, Biden and Kirby are sticking with “climate change is an existential threat” greater than nuclear war, and I assume, greater than a pandemic.
They can pump tax dollars into all the solar panels the Chinese can make, all the EVs that Tesla can produce, and all the bird-killing and unreliable windmills that fail during cold and calm weather, and none of it will prepare a population for a biological weapon. But then, Biden and Kirby know that a 1.5 degree temperature rise is the threat to life, ALL LIFE, as Kirby says. Stop using fossil fuels. Save the cockroaches! Save the rodents!
Put Them back in School
While American resources funnel into the abyss of green energy projects that are designed to stave off that dreaded 1.5 degree Celsius temperature rise, those with nuclear, bioligical, and chemical weapons of mass effect will continue to pose real threats. Biden and Kirby will continue to focus on the weather, ignorant as they are that some droughts have lasted centuries, some warming periods the same, and some cooling periods even longer. Whole cultures have been affected by long-lasting droughts that occurred long before humans burned their first lump of coal.
Kirby and Biden need a lesson in earth history. They need to learn atmospheric chemistry. They need to learn Milankovitch Cycles. They need to learn how climates are defined and how they have changed. They need lessons in the solar constant, proxy data, physical oceanography, atmospheric cycles, weather controls like orographic barriers, and…
In short, Kirby and Biden need lessons in reality, not lessons derived from popular press and failed IPCC models. And they need to pay attention to real threats to American life in particular.
He made the remark to Fox News and said that the President still believes climate change is an existential threat. “More than nuclear weapons?” asked the Fox anchor. Yeah, nods Kirby. "Climate change is an existential threat. It actually threatens and is capable of wiping out all human life on earth over time,” he said with a little smile that indicated he knew more than the rest of us.
What are you thinking? I know I’m saying to myself, “Are these the fools running the country? A slight temperature rise is more of a threat than a nuclear holocaust? Did they ever take a course, even an eighth grade course, in earth science? Have they never seen a documentary on the history of life from, or during any period since, its origin? We’re talking about 3.8 billion years, give or take a week.” Did they ever see pictures of Hiroshima and Nagasaki after they were bombed?
3,800,000,000 Years
Let’s put that Biden-Kirby view in the context of a dynamic Earth: Over the course of 4.56 billion years the planet’s surface has undergone multiple and enormous changes. It wasn’t until about 2.3 billion years ago that the atmosphere underwent the Great Oxidation Event that altered its composition from a mix of noxious gases to something resembling our nitrogen-oxygen-water vapor atmosphere with its minor components argon, carbon dioxide, and a few other gases. And if suspected evidence of early life’s first birth is correct, organisms have weathered some 3.8 billion years of those atmospheric and climate changes, first as unicellular critters and later as multicellular ones. Over the past 300 million years Pennsylvania, now lying at about 40 degrees north, moved from equatorial and tropical latitudes, and today’s hot South Africa moved northward from the Antarctic Circle, where it had lain for tens of millions of years. During a period called Snowball Earth, the planet was cold, very very very cold from poles to Equator, maybe so cold that only a few areas near the Equator were ice or slush free. That Snowball Earth, or cryogenic period, occurred prior to a warming during which unicellular life evolved to become multicellular life—the evolutionary path to us began to snowball itself toward you, Kirby, and Biden during a period of warming. That climatic change back about 650 million years ago, dwarfs the 1.5 degrees Celsius change that Kirby and Biden say is “existential” in nature. And yet, life survived—and thrived.
I’ll repeat. Life not only survived rapid and large temperature changes, but it thrived. It survived and thrived through numerous temperature changes—up and down.
And during the past three to seven or more million years, climate change, aka local warming, probably facilitated random evolution in turning primates into bipedal critters. If droughty conditions eliminate trees, then living in them is impossible. And such aridity appears to have occurred during and prior to Australopithecenes leaving footprints in volcanic ash. We left the trees for life on the savanna. We might be upright walkers because of climate change in eastern Africa. When he isn’t falling, Biden owes his upright stance to climate change. Amazing that Little Lucy mastered walking more than three million years ago while the most powerful man on the planet in the twenty-first century can’t handle a flight of stairs into Air Force One.
Two Kinds of Winter
Does Rear Admiral Kirby, who must have been privy to all the nuclear capabilities of the nuclear powers, think that relatively gradual climate change is a greater threat than nuclear war? He says so.
How did he miss the projections by Carl Sagan and others that “nuclear winter” would be more devastating a change than those three volcanic eruptons were in the ninetenth century, eruptions that led to the “Year without a Summer” in 1816? But nuclear war brings more than just a change in temperature as its dust blankets the planet and blocks sunlight; it brings radiation, long-lasting radiation. By the way, those projections of a nuclear winter are far more believable than those many failed projections of people like Al Gore and the ride-the-grant-money-as-long-as-it-pays-for-confrences-IPCC-scientists who have yet to devise a model that does anyting more than exaggerate and frighten; the predicted results of “climate change,” such as an ice-free Arctic Ocean, the widespread deaths of corals, the hurricane numbers, and a rapidly rising sea, have never materialized. The seas, which have been rising since the end of the last great ice advance, are rising at less than 3 mm per year—if that measurement is accurate. They might continue to rise as they have for the last 10,000 years; we might have to wait, however, for a millennium to see a one meter rise.
Existential Threat to All Life, John Kirby?
And, by the way, Earth underwent a large warming at the beginning of the Cenozoic, sometimes known as the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum. Since then, the planet has been cooling, and its atmospheric carbon has been declining with spikes in both temperature and carbon dioxide content—which, again by the way, can’t be shown to have a direct relationship or direct cause and effect relationship.
But Biden and Kirby will get their earth science knowledge from popular press reports and from anecdotal evidence like a couple of hot weeks in summer or an occasional hurricane that hits a population center. Every storm, every weather event in their minds amounts to proof that climate is changing—which, by yet another way, it has throughout those last 3.8 billion years. There’s no winning the argument with them: Every weather event is an indicator in their minds, even cold Arctic air spilling from Canada into the US.
Biological Warfare
Physical dangers like nuclear blasts and radiation are serious threats to human life. But what of biological threats? Have Kirby and Biden forgotten the recent pandemic? Biden has received about a thousand vaccinations, so I assume he knows that a biological weapon is an existential threat. Yet, Biden and Kirby are sticking with “climate change is an existential threat” greater than nuclear war, and I assume, greater than a pandemic.
They can pump tax dollars into all the solar panels the Chinese can make, all the EVs that Tesla can produce, and all the bird-killing and unreliable windmills that fail during cold and calm weather, and none of it will prepare a population for a biological weapon. But then, Biden and Kirby know that a 1.5 degree temperature rise is the threat to life, ALL LIFE, as Kirby says. Stop using fossil fuels. Save the cockroaches! Save the rodents!
Put Them back in School
While American resources funnel into the abyss of green energy projects that are designed to stave off that dreaded 1.5 degree Celsius temperature rise, those with nuclear, bioligical, and chemical weapons of mass effect will continue to pose real threats. Biden and Kirby will continue to focus on the weather, ignorant as they are that some droughts have lasted centuries, some warming periods the same, and some cooling periods even longer. Whole cultures have been affected by long-lasting droughts that occurred long before humans burned their first lump of coal.
Kirby and Biden need a lesson in earth history. They need to learn atmospheric chemistry. They need to learn Milankovitch Cycles. They need to learn how climates are defined and how they have changed. They need lessons in the solar constant, proxy data, physical oceanography, atmospheric cycles, weather controls like orographic barriers, and…
In short, Kirby and Biden need lessons in reality, not lessons derived from popular press and failed IPCC models. And they need to pay attention to real threats to American life in particular.
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