Boo hoo. Columbia is now hard pressed to eliminate antisemitism on campus. If the university doesn’t adopt a practical plan, Trump will withhold about $400 Million in federal money (actually, if you are a taxpayer, it’s your money).
Well, as you might guess, the school has scrambled to rectify antisemitism that was years in the making. Whether or not the new plans, which include increased numbers of campus police and more patrols added to investigative and disciplinary committees and tribunals, will satisfy Trump, the DOJ, and Jewish students and alumni remains to be seen.
So, what was at stake at Columbia? What were the 400 million dollars going to buy you? How about taming the climate crisis? You want that, don’t you? Or are you some MAGA dolt who thinks that climate change isn’t an existential crisis? (If you can understand what “existential climate crisis” means, that is, given your inability even to sign your X account “X”). But if I might assume you are interested in what Columbians have to say at your expense…
Taming the Climate Crisis?
Fortunately for those of us still trying to learn which side of an umbrella is up, the folks at Columbia Climate School, where they discuss “Climate, Earth, and Society” while drunk on latte, have produced a document online called a “State of the Planet.” Hold on, Buckaroo, you’re about to go on a wild ride at the academic rodeo.
A bunch of really bright people gathered for a symposium to discuss among other topics how AI might “tame the climate crisis.” * Among them was Adam Sobel, who said,“What’s happened now is that the AI [weather prediction] models—which essentially didn’t exist something like five years ago—have become as good by many metrics or even arguably better by some than the [traditional] physics-based models.” Let’s give that a think. How have those “metrics” worked for us so far? Remember all those IPCC predictions for 2020 made back in 2000? Which one of them has come true? Consider also the actual measurements fudged by “climatologists” who extrapolated (and still extrapolate) data from nonexistent weather stations and from weather stations under the dome of urban heat islands. Or consider proxy measurements that are not quantities that engender faith in their accuracy plus or minus a degree or three. And finally, consider the ass backward historical record that shows some carbon dioxide increases occurred after an increase in temperature.
Sitting on the stage with Sobel was Dustin Rubenstein, a self-proclaimed “behavioral ecologist” (? was my first thought), who said, We can use images to capture individual zebras—I think that was the first species because they have almost a barcode, like a fingerprint—and you can make really good population projections and follow those animals and see where they go, so to see what happens during droughts or periods of land use change ….” You followin’ this?
I think I get it. If you know how an individual zebra, errrr, person behaves, you can extrapolate how a population of zebras, errr, people will or might behave. Rubenstein (Is he a Jew at Columbia? Good for him. Good for Columbia, a seat of antisemitism. Maybe things aren’t as bad as…nah)—but in truth, I knew a Catholic priest named Father Goldberg, so, what’s in a name? as Juliet asks), as I was saying, Rubenstein goes on to say, “we can scale up from actual individual level variation and differences up to populations, up to ecosystems, and make much better projections of how organisms are going to respond to change.” That seems reasonable, but, I see two problems:
1) We humans don’t always act in our self interest or even in the interest of our survival and
2) The notion of a “crisis” isn’t a physical phenomenon.
Crisis is a human thing, a perception. One man’s crisis is another man’s transgenderism. That is, one country’s drought isn’t another country’s. Rain not falling on your umbrella is falling on someone else’s. Warmer temperatures might mean that farmers who plant hard red spring wheat might have to switch to planting hard red winter wheat. The timing of the harvest, not the quantity of wheat, might change. Crisis is a human thing. Crises are met with varying attitudes from indifference to panic. Want to tame the “climate crisis”?
Tame the people who have panicked over the past thirty years that the world is coming to an end because no matter what the people gathered at the last 29 conferences (COP 1-29) have said or proposed, they have no more control over climate change than the Vikings did as Greenland turned from warm to cooler temperatures and the Northern Hemisphere transitioned from the Medieval Warm Period to the Little Ice Age.
Artificial Intelligence, even quantum AI, can run every simulation to arrive at a reasonable and practical solution, but as I have written before, some would-be Rodion Raskolnikov will screw things up simply because he believes he can. (Think of those who attack Tesla dealerships and vandalize owners’ Teslas to achieve—what? Didn't some of those Tesla owners buy their cars to save the planet? Aren't they being punished for their altruistic purchases?) You want a cooler world? Someone else wants a warmer world—thus all those old snowbirds living at The Villages in Florida. You want a carbon-free energy system? Someone else wants cheap energy derived from fossil fuels. Someone who owns millions of tons of coal wants to profit from that resource. Some country called China or India will buy and burn.
That $400 Million
I might be wrong in assuming that you and I paid for the symposium on taming the climate change crisis. But if we did pay with federally distributed taxes, what, Buckaroo, did we get for our bucks?
*News from the Columbia climate School: https://news.climate.columbia.edu/2025/03/11/ai-climate-crisis-event/
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