Timothy Birdnow

Last night I had a dream. In my dream there was a Bigfoot doing karate fighting. He would kick his giant leg up, knocking the massive foot into the heads of his opponents. It looked like a giant dust mop in the face of his competitors! (There have been a number of things on television about Big Foot lately, so I guess it put the idea in my noggin.) When I awoke it occurred to me that this is the perfect analogy for the Global Warming scare.

There are people - lots of them - who believe Bigfoot is a real thing. There are some who believe aliens from other star systems visit Earth for the express purpose of probing their rectums. There are people who believe in sea serpents on European lakes. The interesting ting is that often they can make a good case - provide eye witness accounts, tantalizing circumstantial evidence, and present a logical, reasoned argument.

What they can't do is provide any concrete evidence.

What we are provided with are blurry photographs that may or may not be staged, pictures of flying saucers with evidence of pork and beans on the bottom or apparent footprints made by what appears to be feet but don't show a lot of three dimensionality aka imprinted with wooden forms. We have crop circles (that have often proven to be farmers hoaxing a gullible public). We have people who claim to have seen hairy ape-like creatures or flying vehicles. We have people who claim to have been probed in their rectums (why expend the massive amount of energy to cross between stars just to poke around in somebody's anus?)

(Oh, I understand; they want to know about us. But why not simply go on the internet? We broadcast the internet around the world and the aliens surely can tap our primitive radio broadcasts. And they will learn far too much from Facebook, more than they want to know. In fact, they will probably wipe us ot as a galactic plague if they think what is on Facebook represents the majority of human beings.)

As I say, there are all sorts of fascinating clues but no solid evidence. Where is the Bigfoot skeleton? Surely somebody would have found one by now. Or at least a bone, or at least some fur that could be analyzed for DNA. SOMETHING. We don't have so much as a fossil.

Space aliens are even worse. We have never found anything they have accidentally lost. You would think at some point at lest one alien would toss out a beer can, or at least a Big Mac wrapper. But they haven't, and we don't have any solid evidence. Surely we can find some DNA in the posteriors of one of these people who enjoyed a proctology exam! But it just isn't there. As a result, we don't take Bigfoot or Aliens seriously.

But, with exactly as much empirical evidence, we are supposed to take Global Warming seriously. It's a nice theory,a fun campfire story to scare the kids, and we can talk about it logically, show tantalizing clues, point to fuzzy data graphs, etc. but in the end there are no smoking-gun fossils that prove the theory,no clear cut evidence. It remains a fuzzy, marginal concept that may or may not be true. Just like pictures of Bigfoot, we can't say for certain one way or another. And nobody seems to be able to find solid facts.

Those facts should be there. There should be a hot spot in the tropical troposphere, but it's missing. There should have been much more warming, but the heat is missing. In fact, there has been no warming since 1995, in violation of all the climate models. Sea ice - which should have melted well before glaciers - was up until just a year or two ago. Sea level rise has not increased. Earth's cloud cover has not increased.

In short, there is as much evidence for Bigfoot or space aliens or the Loch Ness Monster as there is for Global Warming. Nobody suggests we fundamentally alter our way of life for the former, but we are told we should give up fossil fuels and pay heavy taxes and reduce our industrial bse solely on the basis of this equally unlikely urban legend.

Posted by: Timothy Birdnow at 09:39 AM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
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