If I created a "Most Interesting Man in the World" meme today it would read, "I don't normally walk my dogs at 6:30 am, but when I do it's because there's an excessive heat warning." Whoa, it's not pleasant here in southern WI. There is a huge wind farm being proposed in our driftless region, an area that wasn't flattened by glaciers. It's a beautiful area of the state and would be carved up and ruined by those behemoths. Irritates me to no end. Put them along interstates and nowhere else.
Similar machinations here: converting 300 acres of prime hilltop real estate into a frickin’ solar panel farm! They’re trying to save the planet, even if they have to ruin every habitable square inch of its surface to do so… Disgusting.
I was there for over 2 hours...they injected me with dye so they could get an X-Ray of the back of my eyes...I went to at least 5 rooms of different eye tests, procedures
This is a large office, fifteen drs and many other employees, they take up a whole floor ( the second( in the building they are in ( where my dermatologist is too, though on the first floor
When I finally saw the Dr, he said that since I caught it so fast, there wasn't much damage and the shots should be very successful, which was good news...
My left eye is a little better and I just have to keep taking the AREDS-2
The shot wasn't really that bad, more like just a hard pressure than a sharp pain, and it was only a couple of minutes, they eye drop a lot of local in the eye...didn't see what device was used to hold my eye open, but it worked
When I got home my eyes were overly dilated ( they also told me what they use is a lot stronger than what the optometrist uses
Thank goodness my GF could take me, no way I could have drove home...everything was really blurry..
It stayed that way the rest of the evening and you can't rub your eyes, boy , was that hard not to do
By Saturday morning it was much better
Since then, I haven't had the extra letters problem, but, the Dr said it is common for them to come and go in the early stages...My next shot is next month
I am relieved (mostly) now at least
Thanks for everyone's good thoughts, it apparently helped...
My next project is to find out what is wrong with my left knee...lol
No, my right eye suddenly went to the wet version of macular degeneration...so, that is why the shot...my left eye is the dry kind, and hopefully that one stays that way
Oops...I didn't know because I didn't have time over the week end to come by...
Thanks me too...
Yeah, I don't know if it is arthritis which was my first thought, as I have it in the right knee, though it is mild...but, this hurts more and more frequently...
Might be my hips or even teh osteoporis...I will wait a bit, because I taken so much time off lately...not that Bill minds, I just am the only one who can do the stuff that needs done
Maybe also because Trump’s an attention whore, uh, attention prostitute, uh, I mean attention sex worker.
Reminded me of a clip from the BBC/AcornTV series “The Other One”.
Young lady Cathy is leaving her adult ed math class and unlocking her bicycle. The teacher who’s a bit sweet on her pulls up beside her on the kerb, saying: “I’m a little embarrassed. I wanted to ask you out, but isn’t this a bit much like creeping?”
Cathy: Pardon?
Teacher: You know, isn’t it called ‘creeping’ when a bloke creeps along the kerb looking for a whore?
Cathy: [nervous laugh] I think they’re called ‘sex workers’ now.
T: [nervous laugh] [look of confusion] Wait, you’re a sex worker?
C: No! I, er, meant we don’t say ‘whore’…I mean… nevermind. Er, yes, I’d love to go out with you!
There was a very spirited debate on X about KDW's book review/Bagham bashing article.
The gist was that as Christians, we need to lower the nasty rhetoric. It's okay to be critical in a review, but not make it personal. The author called out KDW for his inappropriate comments.
KDW didn't respond, but I suspect he was notified of the commends made about him.
"Quondam" means "that used to be." Maybe Mr. Williamson means the involvement with nude models? Or maybe he's referring to a movie which (I think I recall reading) Mr. Trump appeared in. However, appearing in a pornographic movie doesn't make you a "pornographer."
From a 2018 item: ' BuzzFeed News recently uncovered a relic from Trump's past: a softcore video documentary made in 1999 called “Playboy Video Centerfold 2000". '
Maybe Mr. Williamson is trying to say that Trump is a pornographer manque', "that might have been," rather than quondam, "that used to be."
I think Mr. Williamson's oft' repeated "Uday and Qusay" for Trump's sons is gratuitous. Saddam Hussein's sons were torturers and murderers. Don Jr and Eric Trump go on social media.
I get a lot of, "It's just a joke," but at best, it's a joke that was a little amusing one time, not so brilliant it needs to come out every other article.
I just had to come here to comment on my latest bill from my clinic. I recently went in to get some blood drawn (by a student, who left me with a huge bruise!). One tube that was sent in to check my thyroid. I only paid $25, but the bill that was sent to my insurance was $425!!!! How is that possible?!
The hubs will often do procedures in the office that he would otherwise do in the OR (usually for tough, strapping farmers) who don't have insurance to keep the price down.
Well of course the climate is changing. It's been changing ever since the earth came into being as a planet that has a freakin' climate. Hotter, colder, hotter again, more noxious gasses, less, more violent storms, fewer...
I'll just go on and say it: Duh, people!! ("People" in general, not *CSLF* people; we're the smartest, most well-informed rational actors on the face of the planet, right? Right?!)
The earth's climate is a dynamic entity that will change, if for no other reason than the laws of thermodynamics and, in the end (and not to be a Debbie Downer) entropy, that little ol' principle that's a more ultimate destroyer of worlds and universes than that Oppenheimer guy could have ever hoped to be.
Does that mean we need to needlessly fill our atmosphere with an overabundance of the junk byproducts of our own existence? Well, again, duh. But does it also mean that the world as we know it will end if we don't dive headlong and hell bent for election into some course of action determined to be the be-all, end-all of solutions by a bunch of "activists"(the bane of a calm, quiet life on this orb) to a problem the nature of which is to just go on and occur anyway, with or without our input as a living species?
How long have we been keeping actual organized and dependable records on weather and temperatures? Since 1880? Off the top of my head that accounts for about 0.000000032% of the time the earth's been around to keep records about, which is about the same percentage of time the earth has existed as a planet within the universe as we know and understand it today.
I know the lab-coated big brains have their core samples and what not, and I'll not be disparaging scientific research here. Without such, I wouldn't be able to sit here on my couch in airconditioned comfort holding forth on the subject of scientific research and sending my well-reasoned thoughts to a bunch of people spread around the country at something approaching the speed of...
Hmm... maybe a little disparagement of lab-coated big brains is actually in order after all.
Be that as it may, if I want a good *narrative*, I'll read a good book. If I simply want narrative and a whole lot of it, I'll read Moby Dick. (Or watch a national political convention.) Other than that... Just the facts, ma'am (and you too, sir) minus the sky-is-falling-'cause-there's-too-much-stuff-in-it narrative, please. You're giving me a worse headache than an actual falling sky would.
Edit: To help stop the advent of a global thermodynamic catastrophe from an overheated atmosphere, we should perhaps consider limiting politicians' completely unlimited free speech rights rather than eliminating fossil fuels.
Edit, part deux: Eliminating near-fossilized entrenched politicians... now there's a real plan we should all get behind. If that doesn't help improve the atmosphere around here, nothing will...
I like it when people use a “common sense” approach to things. Lately, I’ve been reading about all the money spent on promoting EVs, and that it isn’t panning out. Our weather patterns have definitely changed, but this isn’t new! I remember when they were predicting another ice age, and it wasn’t all that long ago.
We are surrounded by cornfields, and apparently that has an impact on the weather. We’ve had some truly cold winters and hot summers, but winters have been more mild in recent years (fine with me!), and this summer has been exceptionally cool, although we are into a heat wave this week.
In the last 20 years, we’ve had too much rain some years, and not enough others. It’s hot in the South and Southwest, and there isn’t enough water in the southwest because it’s desert! OTOH, we tend to have flooding in Wisconsin because we’re between the Great Lakes and the Mississippi, and we have lots of lakes, rivers and marshes.
We could use some rain now, but that’s normal for August, and at least the grass doesn’t need cutting every few days! Life is good!
Katie helped me decorate my newly assigned glass case. it's a "double wide", so it is 4' high and 6' wide. Red paper background and blue paper trim. Plus a diamond in the middle (blue paper), so announcements can be pinned inside the diamond. We put up our signs, etc., it looks good. She deliberately did not try to make the diamonds exact, nor hang them the same exact height. She said by doing it deliberately people see it isn't a mistake. A quilting tip!
Katie helped me hand a picture of the UD chapel on the wall in my office. We hung three items (she likes threes), and so when you look at the wall over my desk, it looks nice. The other walls are well, eclectic. I had a giant rug shaped as a fried egg next to one shaped as a strip of bacon. Someone once asked why I have the giant egg and bacon on my floor: "Because I don't have a frying pan that big"! The answer scared them.... I like visual stimulation, so it works.
One of the methods I use in my research is an "abnormal return". Basically, you study the pattern of something over a long period of time, and "predict" what should be now. You compare that to what is occurring now, to see if the change is favorable or unfavorable. For example, when businesses signed the business roundtable's "purpose of a corporation" letter, were stock priced reactions positive or negative? We took a year's worth of data for 140+ companies, creating a relationship between that and the S & P 500 index. We then looked at the change to the index on the date the letter was announced, and predicted what stock prices ought to do. We found a positive abnormal return of about 0.35% (statistically significant).
I raise this because the earth is believed to be over 4 billion years old (I think 4.4-4.6 billion). But we have limited climate data of any accuracy and precision beyond a few hundred years. Is that enough? If we mapped 4.4 billion years into a year, each second would represent about 120-130 years. So we have 2-3 seconds of data. I'm dating myself, but we used to call that a "snapshot".
How much of the climate change do we see is caused by us puny earthlings, and how much is natural variation? I'd feel better about climate models if I knew.
It doesn't mean we shouldn't try to do better than we have, but the "existential" thinking sounds hysterical to me. As an eagle scout, "leave no trace" was a value system. We tried to take care of nature, but we still had campouts and campfires. Burning fallen sticks/logs reduced forest fire concerns. I think prudence is a good value here...
I agree it is good to recognize that humans should not mess up the planet to the point where it no longer provides an environment conducive to a good life for humanity. At the same time I think we ought to be cautious about declaring that we know exactly what the climate (climates, really, because there are lots of different ones on the planet) ought to be like and that it should fit those specifications at all times or else it means we are doing something wrong and moreover must fix it in some specific way. We just don't know enough. And selecting facts based on ideological positions does not help with that problem.
I agree. I've often mentioned that a step prior to "fixing" the climate is to decide exactly what "the climate" should be. Otherwise, you can't say any particular state of climateness is worse than any other, only that it's different.
A particuarly shaky version of what the climate should be: What people think (or feel) they remember from their childhood and youth in a particular region. These kinds of memories/impressions don't necessarily match up well with actual statistics.
I couldn’t agree more about the poverty of the data, as well as the stewardship.
It’s one of the things that modernity fools us into, thanks to our modern abilities to measure everything and express it as data and numbers. It fools us into thinking we’ve got greater understanding and insights of how things work.
What they do with climate reconstructions is slightly better than, say, estimating the size of ancient economies, such as ancient Greece or Rome. Imagine trying to “reconstruct” the value of GDP for those times, much less hind-casting S&P values for the day Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon. That requires a lot of assumptions and guesswork as to be an exercise more in imaginative interpretation than accurate numerical modeling.
We've got a week of hot weather ahead. Supposed to be 98 today. I like warm weather, but I'm losing my sense of humor. I'm hoping we don't have a really hot week into September, as well.
We’re supposed to hit 90 a couple days—a rarity at this elevation. It’s the night-time lows that I watch to determine how muggy the day will feel. It’s still been in the comfortable range, even this morning in the mid-50s.
We just got our Current Environmental Issues for this term. The year's theme is "Sustainable Forestry," and it looks like the Global Warming narrative is being challenged by people in the tree business. "Yes," they say, "there are issues with higher temperatures and changes in rainfall patterns, but the real problems we're facing - including disease, pests, and wildfire - have more to do with poor forest management over the last 50-70 years."
A sub-topic is "Traditional Ecological Knowledge," which translates to, "Native Americans used fire to manage woodlands." I'm probably excessively cynical, but I get the idea that it's kind of a gauzy haze of Native or Indigenous aesthetic, so that the bad ol' "Western" white people who ruin everything can start using fire to manage woodlands again. Whatever works.
True enough. As to the "he" in "He's not wrong", even a blind squirrel on the forest floor trips over a nut on occasion. I'll leave it to you to decide what - or who - I'm speaking of there. 🙄
The cynical view probably isn’t misguided, unfortunately.
But environmental issues, much like often the diet/health discussion, are fraught with a gauzy view of prehistoric humans, which at this point is scarcely more than 90 to 99 percent a made-up, best-guess fiction. We’re all somewhat duped by claims of what’s “natural”, probably feeling some pangs of guilt and doubt about how easy the basics of modern survival are.
Remember when Sri Lanka's government declared the country "artificial fertilizer free," and agriculture production dropped by about 75%? We take having enough to eat for granted to an astonishing degree.
I recall the headlines, but had never read through to the details. But it isn’t all that surprising. The EU’s rules for ag products to be GMO-free had an immediate impact on African subsistence farming, too, once upon a time.
Fans of “organic agriculture” don’t realize how many outdated agri-chemicals are permitted—and in what enormous quantities. I’m sure many would be appalled to learn there are tradeoffs more complicated than just “All-Natural” or “Certified Organically Grown” on a package label.
In the summary, I appreciated that the author emphasized land use changes. When it comes to carbon dioxide emissions, the US really doesn't matter: China and India exist. However, local and regional changes in land use make a real difference, especially in the effects of weather events.
If I created a "Most Interesting Man in the World" meme today it would read, "I don't normally walk my dogs at 6:30 am, but when I do it's because there's an excessive heat warning." Whoa, it's not pleasant here in southern WI. There is a huge wind farm being proposed in our driftless region, an area that wasn't flattened by glaciers. It's a beautiful area of the state and would be carved up and ruined by those behemoths. Irritates me to no end. Put them along interstates and nowhere else.
Be sure to check out today’s thread, too!
Similar machinations here: converting 300 acres of prime hilltop real estate into a frickin’ solar panel farm! They’re trying to save the planet, even if they have to ruin every habitable square inch of its surface to do so… Disgusting.
Just quickly, as I am pressed for time
For those who didn't see my post on TD Friday
I was there for over 2 hours...they injected me with dye so they could get an X-Ray of the back of my eyes...I went to at least 5 rooms of different eye tests, procedures
This is a large office, fifteen drs and many other employees, they take up a whole floor ( the second( in the building they are in ( where my dermatologist is too, though on the first floor
When I finally saw the Dr, he said that since I caught it so fast, there wasn't much damage and the shots should be very successful, which was good news...
My left eye is a little better and I just have to keep taking the AREDS-2
The shot wasn't really that bad, more like just a hard pressure than a sharp pain, and it was only a couple of minutes, they eye drop a lot of local in the eye...didn't see what device was used to hold my eye open, but it worked
When I got home my eyes were overly dilated ( they also told me what they use is a lot stronger than what the optometrist uses
Thank goodness my GF could take me, no way I could have drove home...everything was really blurry..
It stayed that way the rest of the evening and you can't rub your eyes, boy , was that hard not to do
By Saturday morning it was much better
Since then, I haven't had the extra letters problem, but, the Dr said it is common for them to come and go in the early stages...My next shot is next month
I am relieved (mostly) now at least
Thanks for everyone's good thoughts, it apparently helped...
My next project is to find out what is wrong with my left knee...lol
YIKES....I missed your post. What was the diagnosis on your eyes? Retinal tear usually only involves one eye. Terrifying. I'm glad you're improving.
No, my right eye suddenly went to the wet version of macular degeneration...so, that is why the shot...my left eye is the dry kind, and hopefully that one stays that way
Thanks Angie
C C let us know the other day—very glad it went smoothly and you’re adjusting. Hope the knee works out, too.
Oops...I didn't know because I didn't have time over the week end to come by...
Thanks me too...
Yeah, I don't know if it is arthritis which was my first thought, as I have it in the right knee, though it is mild...but, this hurts more and more frequently...
Might be my hips or even teh osteoporis...I will wait a bit, because I taken so much time off lately...not that Bill minds, I just am the only one who can do the stuff that needs done
Glad to know you had a successful treatment without too much suffering. Good luck on the knee!
Thanks Cynthia
Kevin Williamson often refers to Trump as a "middling former game-show host and quondam pornographer."
He's certainly vulgar. But was he a pornographer? What's the reference?
Maybe also because Trump’s an attention whore, uh, attention prostitute, uh, I mean attention sex worker.
Reminded me of a clip from the BBC/AcornTV series “The Other One”.
Young lady Cathy is leaving her adult ed math class and unlocking her bicycle. The teacher who’s a bit sweet on her pulls up beside her on the kerb, saying: “I’m a little embarrassed. I wanted to ask you out, but isn’t this a bit much like creeping?”
Cathy: Pardon?
Teacher: You know, isn’t it called ‘creeping’ when a bloke creeps along the kerb looking for a whore?
Cathy: [nervous laugh] I think they’re called ‘sex workers’ now.
T: [nervous laugh] [look of confusion] Wait, you’re a sex worker?
C: No! I, er, meant we don’t say ‘whore’…I mean… nevermind. Er, yes, I’d love to go out with you!
I like the way you say "kerb," because that's obviously how it's spelled from the dialogue.
I see I still missed out on saying “maths” instead of “math”.
We noticed the use of "maths" on an episode of "Clarkson Farm." Season 3 is really good.
Beautiful! 😂
There was a very spirited debate on X about KDW's book review/Bagham bashing article.
The gist was that as Christians, we need to lower the nasty rhetoric. It's okay to be critical in a review, but not make it personal. The author called out KDW for his inappropriate comments.
KDW didn't respond, but I suspect he was notified of the commends made about him.
I suspect he felt he was justified because ... dunno.
"Quondam" means "that used to be." Maybe Mr. Williamson means the involvement with nude models? Or maybe he's referring to a movie which (I think I recall reading) Mr. Trump appeared in. However, appearing in a pornographic movie doesn't make you a "pornographer."
Maybe a "pornographee"?
A porneion.
Yeah. I was thinking something like that. Trump was on a Playboy cover. But Jimmy Carter famously was interviewed in PB.
Adam West seems to have made a bad decision and appeared in something pornographic (or adjacent). But no one calls him a quondom pornographer.
Maybe there's a better explanation. But it seems gratuitous.
From a 2018 item: ' BuzzFeed News recently uncovered a relic from Trump's past: a softcore video documentary made in 1999 called “Playboy Video Centerfold 2000". '
Maybe Mr. Williamson is trying to say that Trump is a pornographer manque', "that might have been," rather than quondam, "that used to be."
I think Mr. Williamson's oft' repeated "Uday and Qusay" for Trump's sons is gratuitous. Saddam Hussein's sons were torturers and murderers. Don Jr and Eric Trump go on social media.
Where, like their father, they sometimes torture the English language. A crime I myself have at times been accused of, but never convicted.
I wouldn't know.
Which is torture for some of us
I avoid it. Them.
I get a lot of, "It's just a joke," but at best, it's a joke that was a little amusing one time, not so brilliant it needs to come out every other article.
I just had to come here to comment on my latest bill from my clinic. I recently went in to get some blood drawn (by a student, who left me with a huge bruise!). One tube that was sent in to check my thyroid. I only paid $25, but the bill that was sent to my insurance was $425!!!! How is that possible?!
The hubs will often do procedures in the office that he would otherwise do in the OR (usually for tough, strapping farmers) who don't have insurance to keep the price down.
They raise the list price of things in order recover different amounts from different payers.
I understand it. But it doesn't make me feel better about the system.
Same.
Well of course the climate is changing. It's been changing ever since the earth came into being as a planet that has a freakin' climate. Hotter, colder, hotter again, more noxious gasses, less, more violent storms, fewer...
I'll just go on and say it: Duh, people!! ("People" in general, not *CSLF* people; we're the smartest, most well-informed rational actors on the face of the planet, right? Right?!)
The earth's climate is a dynamic entity that will change, if for no other reason than the laws of thermodynamics and, in the end (and not to be a Debbie Downer) entropy, that little ol' principle that's a more ultimate destroyer of worlds and universes than that Oppenheimer guy could have ever hoped to be.
Does that mean we need to needlessly fill our atmosphere with an overabundance of the junk byproducts of our own existence? Well, again, duh. But does it also mean that the world as we know it will end if we don't dive headlong and hell bent for election into some course of action determined to be the be-all, end-all of solutions by a bunch of "activists"(the bane of a calm, quiet life on this orb) to a problem the nature of which is to just go on and occur anyway, with or without our input as a living species?
How long have we been keeping actual organized and dependable records on weather and temperatures? Since 1880? Off the top of my head that accounts for about 0.000000032% of the time the earth's been around to keep records about, which is about the same percentage of time the earth has existed as a planet within the universe as we know and understand it today.
I know the lab-coated big brains have their core samples and what not, and I'll not be disparaging scientific research here. Without such, I wouldn't be able to sit here on my couch in airconditioned comfort holding forth on the subject of scientific research and sending my well-reasoned thoughts to a bunch of people spread around the country at something approaching the speed of...
Hmm... maybe a little disparagement of lab-coated big brains is actually in order after all.
Be that as it may, if I want a good *narrative*, I'll read a good book. If I simply want narrative and a whole lot of it, I'll read Moby Dick. (Or watch a national political convention.) Other than that... Just the facts, ma'am (and you too, sir) minus the sky-is-falling-'cause-there's-too-much-stuff-in-it narrative, please. You're giving me a worse headache than an actual falling sky would.
Edit: To help stop the advent of a global thermodynamic catastrophe from an overheated atmosphere, we should perhaps consider limiting politicians' completely unlimited free speech rights rather than eliminating fossil fuels.
Edit, part deux: Eliminating near-fossilized entrenched politicians... now there's a real plan we should all get behind. If that doesn't help improve the atmosphere around here, nothing will...
I'm more concerned with the skyrocketing cases of autism and that globally men's sperm counts are decreasing.
I like it when people use a “common sense” approach to things. Lately, I’ve been reading about all the money spent on promoting EVs, and that it isn’t panning out. Our weather patterns have definitely changed, but this isn’t new! I remember when they were predicting another ice age, and it wasn’t all that long ago.
We are surrounded by cornfields, and apparently that has an impact on the weather. We’ve had some truly cold winters and hot summers, but winters have been more mild in recent years (fine with me!), and this summer has been exceptionally cool, although we are into a heat wave this week.
In the last 20 years, we’ve had too much rain some years, and not enough others. It’s hot in the South and Southwest, and there isn’t enough water in the southwest because it’s desert! OTOH, we tend to have flooding in Wisconsin because we’re between the Great Lakes and the Mississippi, and we have lots of lakes, rivers and marshes.
We could use some rain now, but that’s normal for August, and at least the grass doesn’t need cutting every few days! Life is good!
I just said to myself this morning, "the grass is getting brown, the first time this summer." Usually that starts happening in mid July.
I’m jealous that you got rain this morning (9/5), and it completely missed us!
Katie helped me decorate my newly assigned glass case. it's a "double wide", so it is 4' high and 6' wide. Red paper background and blue paper trim. Plus a diamond in the middle (blue paper), so announcements can be pinned inside the diamond. We put up our signs, etc., it looks good. She deliberately did not try to make the diamonds exact, nor hang them the same exact height. She said by doing it deliberately people see it isn't a mistake. A quilting tip!
Katie helped me hand a picture of the UD chapel on the wall in my office. We hung three items (she likes threes), and so when you look at the wall over my desk, it looks nice. The other walls are well, eclectic. I had a giant rug shaped as a fried egg next to one shaped as a strip of bacon. Someone once asked why I have the giant egg and bacon on my floor: "Because I don't have a frying pan that big"! The answer scared them.... I like visual stimulation, so it works.
What, no hash browns?
Congratulations on your new decor. It sounds very tasteful.
One of the methods I use in my research is an "abnormal return". Basically, you study the pattern of something over a long period of time, and "predict" what should be now. You compare that to what is occurring now, to see if the change is favorable or unfavorable. For example, when businesses signed the business roundtable's "purpose of a corporation" letter, were stock priced reactions positive or negative? We took a year's worth of data for 140+ companies, creating a relationship between that and the S & P 500 index. We then looked at the change to the index on the date the letter was announced, and predicted what stock prices ought to do. We found a positive abnormal return of about 0.35% (statistically significant).
I raise this because the earth is believed to be over 4 billion years old (I think 4.4-4.6 billion). But we have limited climate data of any accuracy and precision beyond a few hundred years. Is that enough? If we mapped 4.4 billion years into a year, each second would represent about 120-130 years. So we have 2-3 seconds of data. I'm dating myself, but we used to call that a "snapshot".
How much of the climate change do we see is caused by us puny earthlings, and how much is natural variation? I'd feel better about climate models if I knew.
It doesn't mean we shouldn't try to do better than we have, but the "existential" thinking sounds hysterical to me. As an eagle scout, "leave no trace" was a value system. We tried to take care of nature, but we still had campouts and campfires. Burning fallen sticks/logs reduced forest fire concerns. I think prudence is a good value here...
I agree it is good to recognize that humans should not mess up the planet to the point where it no longer provides an environment conducive to a good life for humanity. At the same time I think we ought to be cautious about declaring that we know exactly what the climate (climates, really, because there are lots of different ones on the planet) ought to be like and that it should fit those specifications at all times or else it means we are doing something wrong and moreover must fix it in some specific way. We just don't know enough. And selecting facts based on ideological positions does not help with that problem.
"what the climate ought to be like"
I agree. I've often mentioned that a step prior to "fixing" the climate is to decide exactly what "the climate" should be. Otherwise, you can't say any particular state of climateness is worse than any other, only that it's different.
A particuarly shaky version of what the climate should be: What people think (or feel) they remember from their childhood and youth in a particular region. These kinds of memories/impressions don't necessarily match up well with actual statistics.
That's a very good point.
When policy (or philosophy) focuses on One Thing, it ignores a lot of Other Things. I see a lot of that in the Climate ideology.
I couldn’t agree more about the poverty of the data, as well as the stewardship.
It’s one of the things that modernity fools us into, thanks to our modern abilities to measure everything and express it as data and numbers. It fools us into thinking we’ve got greater understanding and insights of how things work.
What they do with climate reconstructions is slightly better than, say, estimating the size of ancient economies, such as ancient Greece or Rome. Imagine trying to “reconstruct” the value of GDP for those times, much less hind-casting S&P values for the day Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon. That requires a lot of assumptions and guesswork as to be an exercise more in imaginative interpretation than accurate numerical modeling.
We've got a week of hot weather ahead. Supposed to be 98 today. I like warm weather, but I'm losing my sense of humor. I'm hoping we don't have a really hot week into September, as well.
There’s warm, and then there’s too warm. It’s too warm here this week, but we’ve been spoiled by a really nice summer, with great temps!
We’re supposed to hit 90 a couple days—a rarity at this elevation. It’s the night-time lows that I watch to determine how muggy the day will feel. It’s still been in the comfortable range, even this morning in the mid-50s.
Same in Wisconsin.
We just got our Current Environmental Issues for this term. The year's theme is "Sustainable Forestry," and it looks like the Global Warming narrative is being challenged by people in the tree business. "Yes," they say, "there are issues with higher temperatures and changes in rainfall patterns, but the real problems we're facing - including disease, pests, and wildfire - have more to do with poor forest management over the last 50-70 years."
A sub-topic is "Traditional Ecological Knowledge," which translates to, "Native Americans used fire to manage woodlands." I'm probably excessively cynical, but I get the idea that it's kind of a gauzy haze of Native or Indigenous aesthetic, so that the bad ol' "Western" white people who ruin everything can start using fire to manage woodlands again. Whatever works.
We're always overlooking the obvious. Rake America Great Again...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7CGQv8IDAWw
He's not wrong. Clearing fuels from the forest floor is very basic wildfire risk reduction.
True enough. As to the "he" in "He's not wrong", even a blind squirrel on the forest floor trips over a nut on occasion. I'll leave it to you to decide what - or who - I'm speaking of there. 🙄
Someone explained it to him, and he remembered long enough to repeat it.
The cynical view probably isn’t misguided, unfortunately.
But environmental issues, much like often the diet/health discussion, are fraught with a gauzy view of prehistoric humans, which at this point is scarcely more than 90 to 99 percent a made-up, best-guess fiction. We’re all somewhat duped by claims of what’s “natural”, probably feeling some pangs of guilt and doubt about how easy the basics of modern survival are.
Remember when Sri Lanka's government declared the country "artificial fertilizer free," and agriculture production dropped by about 75%? We take having enough to eat for granted to an astonishing degree.
I recall the headlines, but had never read through to the details. But it isn’t all that surprising. The EU’s rules for ag products to be GMO-free had an immediate impact on African subsistence farming, too, once upon a time.
Fans of “organic agriculture” don’t realize how many outdated agri-chemicals are permitted—and in what enormous quantities. I’m sure many would be appalled to learn there are tradeoffs more complicated than just “All-Natural” or “Certified Organically Grown” on a package label.
Shhh! You'll wake the children!
I already did. I'll be waking them earlier tomorrow, if they don't get a move on today.
I wish in a past life to have been a mom who played coronet and blasted out Reveille each morning.
Good morning. Good article.
Morning. Thanks!
I found it interesting and convincing. I have never doubted that human actions affect the environment. But I've always wondered how much.
Are the changes caused 90 percent by human action? or 9 percent? Or more like 0.9 percent?
I neither know nor trust the people who report on such things to tell me. Crises! Tornadoes! Hurricanes! That's what I need to know.
So, mostly I try to be responsible and go about my own business.
In the summary, I appreciated that the author emphasized land use changes. When it comes to carbon dioxide emissions, the US really doesn't matter: China and India exist. However, local and regional changes in land use make a real difference, especially in the effects of weather events.