I have a pen. This pen is in my hand, and I am holding this pen at arm’s length over my head. I am preparing to drop this pen.
Before dropping this pen, let me explain to you the SCIENTIFIC LAW known to scholars as STEVE’S UNIVERSAL LAW OF GRAVITY. It is an important natural law you see daily and don’t even realize it, and it is my LAW OF GRAVITY that predicts the motion of this pen, for when I drop this pen it shall behave in one of these fashions:
1.) It will drop to Earth at the rate of 9.8m/s2, the acceleration due to Steve’s Universal Law of Gravity.
2.) It will fall to Earth at a rate of 98 m/s2.
3.) It will fall to Earth at a rate of 980 m/s2.
4.) It will fall to Earth at a rate of ∞+1 m/s2.
5.) It will fall to Earth at a rate of ∞-1 m/s2.
6.) It will momentarily sit stationary in the air where I released the pen, and then it will twirl clockwise in a horizontal (relative to the Earth) fashion at a velocity of 9.8 m/s for 9.8 seconds, and then it will fall to the Earth.
7.) It will whiz off to the cat nearest in proximity to this event, poke it in the left eye, and then fall to Earth.
8.) It will never fall to Earth and instead follow Handsome Actor James Woods around like a lovesick teenage girl with good taste in men for all eternity.
9.) It will fall to Earth, but only when the sun is at High Noon.
10.) It will fall to Earth whilst singing “In The City” by the band Madness.
11.) It will fall to Earth whilst whistling the tune to “Nasty Habits” by the band Oingo Boingo.
12.) It will fall to Earth but only after demanding Fair Trade Kumquats be sold at Whole Foods.
13.) It will fall to Earth, rest there for a few days, and then begin its career as a freelance proctologist.
14.) It will fall to Earth and then stay there forever, or until someone who wields the Power of Thor picks it up.
15.) It will fall to Earth and then get in line for the next movie in the Marvel Cinematic Universe because everyone lines up for these things and no one is sick to death of Marvel movies already.
16.) It will bounce off the ceiling, clip the toilet seat, hit the knob on the oven turning it 450, fly between my rabbit’s ears, pierce the next door neighbor’s forehead, and then call it a day, never falling to Earth.
17.) It will fall to Earth when good and ready to do so, thank you very much.
18.) It will fall to Mars.
19.) It will fall to Earth at twice the acceleration due to gravity of a pen half its mass.
20.) It will ALWAYS fall to Earth.
This list can go on and on and on, although let me trim things here and state explicitly the nature STEVE’S UNIVERSAL LAW OF GRAVITY:
There is another predictive model in nature that is not yet a SCIENTIFIC LAW, although it does have one key component that is exactly similar to STEVE’S LAW OF UNIVERSAL GRAVITY. Let me give some background on this predictive model and then explain what this exact similarity is.
‘Round about the span of the late 1980s and early 1990s the idea of “Global Warming” began popping up in scientific journals, warning human kind that if we didn’t curb our environmentally destructive ways, the Earth would burn up under the thick blanket of atmosphere-hostile gases and soot. The oceans would boil, the solid ground upon we walk would turn to dust and crumble, specie after specie would die every second of every day at an alarming rate, the price of Fig Newtons would skyrocket, and it would be all our own fault.
The mechanism involved is the emission of “greenhouse gases” such as CO2 in such great quantities – from burning fossil fuels, from slash & burn deforestation, or even from your backyard barbecue – that a thick blanket of this “greenhouse gas” forms that “traps” in heat from the sun where it can’t radiate away, and thusly our annual average temperatures worldwide were increasing without any signs of slowing down or stopping. Blanket and trapped heat, just like a “greenhouse.” “The Greenhouse Effect.” And “Global Warning.” Dire! Yikes!
So, about “excess” CO2 and the “Greenhouse Effect.” In very simple terms, a greenhouse works by impeding convection. The misnomered “Greenhouse Effect” caused by “excess” CO2 works by increasing convection, by absorbing a photon from the Sun and then emitting a new photon, explained once again very simply. The cause of “Global Warming” doesn’t even get the physics right in a chosen analogy of a “greenhouse.” Wow! Yikes!
Hang tight. I’m getting there. “Global Warming” was coined in very doomsday parameters that if we didn’t cut back on driving our seven ton Cadillac Escalade 50 miles each way to an inconvenient Walmart location to pick up a tank of propane for the backyard barbecue, by all that is precious, we were going to have this huge blanket of “Greenhouse Gases” and we’d reach a “tipping point” where it’ll be too late and our world will be destroyed. Yikes! Yikes! Yikes!
The weird part is that it turns out this “Global Warming” was based upon sketchy yearly data populations no older than a century, and it was being used to extrapolate grandly this out of control heating of the Earth… and guess what? It turned out to be wrong. These researchers realized that “Global Warming” as they described it wasn’t right. This yearly ramping up of average temperatures doesn’t exist.
Whoops! Yikes!
This might have slipped past you, so I’ll set a challenge. Read professional journals and layman media over the last decade or so that speaks to mankind destroying the environment. Find about 20 or 30 articles on this topic. See how many times you see “Global Warming” or “Greenhouse Effect” in more current literature. I’ll wait here, give you a chance to Google away.
Interesting, yes? “Global Warming” and “Greenhouse Effect” have fallen out of fashion. It’s not even discussed any longer. What do you see in these articles? What mechanism is blamed for mankind destroying the environment?
“Climate Change.” What a crafty turn of phrase, and what a deviously clever transition from a theoretical scientific fallacy – “Greenhouse Effect” and “Global Warming” – to something more encompassing that has a lesser chance of being grudgingly scientifically disproven.
I mean, how can “Climate Change” be disproven? If the temperature in Phoenix, Arizona, remains above 100F four days longer than yearly average, that’s outside of the average and is a form of climate change, and it must be because of something nefariously negligent Phoenicians are doing wrong. If it’s rainier than a yearly average in Seattle, Washington, over the course of five years, that is a form of climate change, and it must be because of something nefariously negligent Seattlers are doing wrong. If summer ocean water temperatures in Huntington Beach, California, stay below 64 degrees and outside average yearly water temperature, that is also climate change, and it must be because of something nefariously negligent surfers are doing wrong.
Low pressure in Qatar where there “should be” high pressure. High pressure in Nepal where there “should be” low pressure. Tornadoes in Florida and hurricanes in Kansas. These are all outside of “should be” and thus are “climate change.”
And it must be because of something nefariously negligent mankind is doing wrong… although no current climate modeling is possible to prove this beyond correlation. Just like expensive watermelons and increase in home invasions.
So let’s look back on STEVE’S UNIVERSAL LAW OF GRAVITY. This pen of mine is no different than if I dropped it or the Exxon Valdez or a feather or feathers still attached to an emu from above my head. STEVE’S UNIVERSAL LAW OF GRAVITY predicts what will happen. Every time.
Likewise, “Climate Change” is very effective in predicting what will happen. Every time.
Do you understand the exact similarity?
And that is a very convenient tool when blaming mankind for destroying the environment, because with “Global Warming” and the “Greenouse Effect” – which only predicted steadily (exponentially for some “leading researchers”) rising temperatures – there was an inherent failure looming if rising global temperatures didn’t pan out. “Climate Change” is much more flexible, for if it gets hot, cold, wet, dry, windy, breezy, blustery, snowy, rainy, icy, or whatever, that is “Climate Change.”
Now, it’s okay to say “You are so wrong! Leading scientists all agree that Climate Change is a reality!” Tell me who these leading scientists are. And show me their convincing climatology models that are so exacting to be able to detail one of the most complex chaotic systems in the entire history of ever. And let me know what certification board is responsible for naming one scientist “leading” and another scientist “not leading.”
STEVE’S UNIVERSAL LAW OF GRAVITY is a satirical take on “Climate Change”, of course. Here on the surface of the Earth, my pen will drop at close to 9.8 m/s2 with great predictable and reproducible regularity. And here on the surface of the Earth, climates do change, but honestly, that has more to do with the geologic time scale, plate tectonics, and the measurable wobble of the rotational axis of the Earth.
Think about it in these terms:
Death Valley once held a beautiful, deep fresh water lake with fish and birds, with men, women and children living upon its shores, and exotic megafauna like mastadons, meohippuses, giant ground sloths, wooly rhinoceroses, North American camels, and beavers the size of a pony splashing within its live-sustaining waters.
Take a look at the map of the Western United States, from Salt Lake City to Palm Springs. Every valley you see had a beautiful, deep fresh water lake, with their source water being Pleistocene ice melt from glaciers and continental ice sheets three miles thick (the Great Lakes of North America are the biggest repositories of the last of these ice sheets).
These lakes are gone. The megafauna have gone extinct. Mankind barely had a foothold in the Americas. And that was only a few eons back.
Mankind was on this continent, only barely. Mankind had not Cadillacs nor tire factories nor oil refineries back then in those pre-Western Civilization days. And ice sheets miles thick melted off long before Europeans and industrialization arrived in the New World.
That’s some pretty severe climate change – more than we’ve seen since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution – in a very short period of time – and I challenge you to model how it is mankind that is responsible for the extreme climate change around the world since the last Ice Age. Perhaps you can call upon some leading scientists to lend you a hand.
Hey! Don’t take that! I want my pen back!
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