When you unfold the cover, the image you see if the earth as we know it today with its deep blue oceans, rich soil, and green forests. This side of the cover reveals an artist’s rendering of an earth where unchecked global warming has wreaked havoc. We are at a crossroads. We must choose which earth will be home to future generations.He would, perhaps have done better to run the image past Kerry Emanuel first, but of course, the jackals pounced.
Well, these days there are three pretty big storms out there, on the other side of the earth, Cyclone Phailin which set a new record for Indian Ocean cyclones, has struck India, Typhoon Nari worked over the Philippeans and another is building up behind it and Typhoon Whipha is out there, strengthening and forcast to sideswipe Tokyo. Of course, Typhoon Usagi which worked over the Chinese coast between Hong Kong and Shanghai, a few days ago, was early to the party. Now some, not Eli to be sure, tell us nevermind that because no hurricanes have hit the US in a while (Sandy, having weakened before landing does not count). Others will note that there have been three tropical cyclones going at the same time before, so never mind. Ah, never mind.
Perhaps the artist and Al were not so far off
ADDED 9/14/2020
But wait, today we have five four in the Atlantic Basin, one in the Caribean amd one off camera on the west coast
Take a bow and collect your money Big Al.
The former Vice President has voluntarily hoist himeslf on the same petard from which Carl Sagan remans suspended .
ReplyDeleteThis genre of envonmental surrealism debuted on the cover of The Cold And The Dark following Carl's dubious decision to hire a PR firm before the fact of peer review to better inflict TTAPS on the popular imagination.
'Framing' and 'science by press conference' arguably date to the retainer paid the all too well named 'Creative Department' of Porter Novelli . that put an artist work air brushing the Northern Hemisohere black in time for TTAPS debut at a televised press conference on Halloween, 1983, two months before it appered in Science, albeit Al seems to have forgotten all of this inconvenient history , which was ventilated at the 1987 Blacksburg , Virginia symposium he chaired, entitled "Is 'nuclear winter' real and relevant?"
Given how malleable computer graphics have since become, Photoshopping the Apocalypse
has become a semiotic norm.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Typhoon_saomai_060807.jpg
ReplyDeleteThat cover shows interesting theory on Coriolis, with hurricanes east of what's left of the USA and west of Peru spinning anticyclonically.
ReplyDeleteI'm glad I can honestly say that I've never seen or read An Inconvenient Truth. It gives me a foot in the door (up to the knee) with people who are authentically confused about the whole issue but who also tend to be a mix of the various conservative positions (or, rather, against anything that is in any way associated with liberalism). I allow and encourage Gore bashing, because as Gore would say (because he believes in what he's pushing), it's the result that matters: action on global warming.
ReplyDeleteI also create confusion among some of the economic conservatives by pointing out that Gore is just another bloody capitalist. He'd still be out for your tax dollars even in the complete absence of global warming. Corporations, after all, are guilty of the same behavior written into the stereotype of the poor: always with a hand out, always stealing, always violent, always limiting the educations of their children.
At risk of being accused of anti-science by Al's minions, again, my favorite is the small but perfect hurricane seen emerging from the intertropical convergence to batter the northern Andes.
ReplyDeleteCaptions are invited explaining how the Greenland ice cap slid uphill to escape the sub-sea level isostatic depression painstakingly depicted by the artiste.
You are indeed the artist Russell:)
ReplyDeleteOf course, if I wasn't so busy with fabrication, I could have looked back forty years for a good hurricane shot.
ReplyDeleteAl
Thanks for posting that, anonymous, that will certainly make an large and positive unambiguous planetary energy imbalance go away! Whew!
ReplyDelete> Bloody capitalist
ReplyDeleteThat would be
Shopping the Apocalypse
> Greenland
It's got a dome over it and a big lake full of nice clean fish in the middle. All the fallout washed off the top before the rest melted. And all the CO2 inside the dome is pure fossil CO2 free of C14. No mutants in there. Tickets can be obtained ... oh, sorry, they're full up.
"All the fallout washed off the top before the rest melted. And all the CO2 inside the dome is pure fossil CO2 free of C14."
ReplyDeleteWill someone please write a manifesto damning the warming effect of decaying carbon 14 as yet another unintended consequence of Anthropocene atom-tampering?
Didn't one of our recent (~5 years) storm seasons feature 3 or was it 4 major hurricanes all spinning in the Atlantic at the same time?
ReplyDelete" large and positive unambiguous planetary energy imbalance"
ReplyDeleteIt is kinda interesting that the CFS reanalysis actually indicates a negative energy imbalance for most of the 2000s.
Diagnostic reanalyses can be wrong, of course, but more so can prognostic models be wrong.
Oh sure. What a waste of time trolls are. Be sure to publish that, ok?
ReplyDeleteAnon,
ReplyDelete'Splain me something, 'Kay? How do you get a negative energy imbalance when the oceans store >95% of the heat in the climate system, and the oceans are still warming rapidly?
I think what you do to get a negative energy imbalance is to ignore the oceans because, apparently, the ARGO floats are unreliable (they each have large errors apparently). At least, that's what I've heard.
ReplyDeleteSlurrealism seems to be very popular in some circles (especially of the family type)
ReplyDelete