Will they change public attitudes on global warming?
I predict no. I suspect that most people who read that kind of thing are have already drunk the koolaid. This is lunacy, really:
“A Visit from the Goon Squad,” which tells the story of people connected by the music business, bounces back and forth over time. When it flashes forward two decades, it shows a world that has been altered by climate change. Trees bloom in January. A February day hits 89 degrees.
No one is predicting those kinds of changes that fast. All this does is destroy their credibility.
Though it would be nice to get people reading this book
I don’t think CO2 *can* produce those levels of warming. Doesn’t the whole effect saturate after a few degrees or so? Even if the atmosphere were 100% CO2, the atmosphere would become completely opaque to the wavelengths that CO2 blocks long before then.
The shallowness of this future projection is embarrassing. Science fantasy writers have been putting out garbage like this for decades. Hubris is a popular topic and there are perhaps thousands of dystopian novels and short stories out there describing the terrible things that happen to us because we were too proud to follow the schemes or dictates of the author.
It smells more like wish fulfillment to me combined with some old-time religion. Humanity fails to believe what I believe, thus they are struck down in my novel, and I gleefully rub my hands as I describe the horrors that they are subjected to as a result.
So why should this have any persuasive power at all? The only reality connected with the story is the hysteria of the author.
Finally, I find it tiresome when someone talks about the nobility of helping people we’ll never meet, namely our remote descendants, when that person has zero clue about what helps or doesn’t help.
Dittos, Karl. .
“Trees bloom in January. A February day hits 89 degrees.”
Sounds like… Florida, and California. You know — places where the music business has a big foothold.
Really, doomsayers, you’ve got to try harder than that. I grew up in Miami — the thought of a day in February that is 89 degrees doesn’t exactly scare me. Nor does the horrid idea of (gasp!) blooming flowers in winter.
89 degrees Fahrenheit in February? BFD. Here in Texas we have hot winter days all the time. In Abilene, the official record high temperature recorded in February is 93 degrees; Amarillo has gotten up to 88 degrees in February; Austin, 99; Brownsville, 94; Corpus Christi, 95; Del Rio, 99 degrees, all in February. Even up here in North Texas we’ve had hot February days (Dallas’ record February high is 95). These aren’t typical of any given February, mind, but it happens, and often enough that nobody thinks it a big deal.
What is weird about Texas weather is how the same locality can have snow one week and a tornado the next. Think I’m exaggerating? I’m not.
If you want to scare Texans, it would have to be over global cooling. I gather I’m a bit west of B. Lewis, and as he says a ninety-degree February is worthy of remark but no big deal — but a 50 degree day in August would get noticed. Texans would probably try to bottle it.
Hmmm, this reminds me, I need to re-read Michael Crichton’s “State of Fear”. Not one of his best, but surely better than this junk.
The problem with “Fallen Angels” is that the greenies take it as a “how to” manual, not a warning.
“”A Visit from the Goon Squad” also imagines a future with miles of solar panels in the desert, placed where lawns and golf courses once stood. The book tells of protests when the panels were installed because they threatened wildlife habitats.
Egan said she extrapolated from miles of windmills that she has seen.
“There’s been this huge, endless debate about doing this stuff near Nantucket,” Egan said. “Will it deface the landscape, or is it a beautiful sign of moving into the future? I could easily imagine the same kinds of debate about solar panels.”
The panels can also track moonlight, an advancement Egan said she wholly invented. ”
You would think from the above that Egan also invented the oral tracking of a Crack Pipe too……….
Also, the seas are going to rise and we’ll all live on boats.
….as long as Kevin Costner isn’t invited.
The panels can also track moonlight, an advancement Egan said she wholly invented. ”
Where do these people learn their basic scientific skills? Not the ‘reciting something an authority told me’ skills, but the “I measured it myself, and realized this is beyond dumb” sorts of skills.
I’ll buy the book if it ends with vandals spray-painting the poem “Ozymanidas” on the wreckage of the desert solar panels.
Don’t know whether anybody noticed it or not, but the book in question apparenty doesn’t refer to carbon dioxide. To wit:
“The sun will slip below the battlement at 4:23 p.m., winter days ending early because the Earth’s orbit has shifted.”
An event large enough to cause the earth’s orbit to “shift” enough to affect climate, occurring over a short time scale, would also cause other (perhaps “actual” is a better word) cataclysms than global warming. In fact, global warming would become what herpes did after AIDS showed up: a welcome diagnosis.
Besides, I thought winter days ended early anyway. I mean, I recently moved to Virginia, and have since observed that the sun goes down in winter as early as before 5pm. This novel is apparently set somewhere in New York, which isn’t that far north, but really, a 4:23 winter sunset isn’t that big of a change. Unless the sun rises at noon or something.
But I actually went and read some of the article (I had to stop and skip — it was too painful). Apparently this novelist claims that global warming is what caused the earth’s axis to shift. I guess the writer thinks that the Earth is sitting on a mound of ice cream or something, and then when the climate warms up, the ice cream melts, and this the Earth starts to slump over. At the end of it all, I guess, it rolls off the table and the dog eats it!
I just wonder what sort of bubble these people grew up in. As far as I can tell, weather occurs in the big, modern cities as well as flyover country. But they seem totally surprised every year when the “climate changes” — that is, when they have to turn their a/c up or put on their heat. And apparently the thing with the warm January and blooming trees actually happened three years ago! To absolutely no cataclysmic anything, even stories in the press, because I never heard about it, and I used to be something of a weather junkie.
mpthompson
Hmmm, this reminds me, I need to re-read Michael Crichton’s “State of Fear”. Not one of his best, but surely better than this junk.
I think that Michael Crichton’s State of Fear has been the only work of fiction that I’ve read that was footnoted!
Great book!
Then you haven’t read Dune. It’s footnoted and has an appendix. And it’s not a decision of later publishers; it’s deliberately included by the author as part of the novel, the footnotes citing “scholarly works” of the future society of Dune, notes on planets, etc. Jack Vance does that with a lot of his scifi novels too — some of it clearly meant to be satirical.
Oh you meant footnoted with facts. But that means Baron Bodissey doesn’t exist! Frown.
“The panels can also track moonlight, an advancement Egan said she wholly invented.”
I thought about doing some calculations. Then, I thought, “hey, why not try using this internet thingy?”
For everyone’s reading pleasure…
With a doubling of CO2, we will see 1 C of warming. With another doubling (of the new level), we’ll see an additional 1 C of warming. It is a log scale of diminishing returns, which few skeptics actually dispute. The real issue of debate between alarmists and skeptics (aka disasturbationists and deniers) is what role water vapor plays. As clouds, water vapor is a negative feedback, by increasing planetary albedo, thus reflecting sunlight away from Earth and cooling the planet. As pure humidity, tho, it exerts a warming effect, absorbing heat and light and reemitting it back to the surface as much as it radiates to space. Which way water behaves depends on several factors: a) whether water will distribute evenly throughout the atmospheric column or remain primarily in the troposphere and/or below that, b) the role that particulates/aerosols play in cloud formation, and how anti-aerosol/anti-particulate legislation in industrial emissions plays into this role, and c) how galactic cosmic rays function in stimulating cloud formation, and if future solar cycles are abnormally low, i.e. a new solar minimum period like the Dalton and Maunder Minima, we will see higher GCR levels and thus more cloud formation, ergo more cooling. More active solar cycles will mean a stronger solar magnetic field and thus fewer GCRs, less cloud formation and thus more warming.
“More active solar cycles should mean a stronger solar magnetic field and thus fewer GCRs, less cloud formation and thus more warming, all other effects remaining equal.”
If there is one thing the debate should have taught us, it is hedging our bets, tamping down hubris, and avoiding the issuance of categorical imperatives based on back-of-the-envelope analysis of monumentally complex systems.
Blooming time for plants is by the photoperiod. Plants bloom based on the number of hours they have been exposed to sunlight over a period of time. Unless february receives more daylight than usual, plants that bloom in march or april or may or june or july… will not bloom, no matter what the temperature is.
Okay, I finally found an article on what was supposed to be this warm January up north. Here it is. (Warning: MSNBC article.) Apparently January 2007 was the warmest January on record for at least the Northeastern US, but it was followed by a very cold February. By the way, I realize that image of the horrifying effects of Global Warming (people jogging in New York City with bare arms and midriffs) is horrifying, but they tell me looking disaster square in the face builds character.
Oops. Used “horrifying” twice. I blame the horror, the horror.