[quote=Hobie]I will restrain myself from going off on how this climate change business is a politically driven crisis and how it is being used to fundamentally change and impede the US economy and lifestyle.
The real rub here is geologic time. Trying to measure any climate change trends in a window of say one hundred years when the earth is >4 Billion years old is nuts.
Scientists understand this, but follow the money. Who gives them their grant $$?.
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if you have an APPLE TV check out the smithsonian channel app, there is a program that might answer you’re question about mass extensions and “time” span calculations
starting at about 33 minutes into the video they describe what happened when the earth was subjected to volcanos erupting over a very large region (what is sib era) and this loaded the atmosphere with CO2 over a timescale of thousands of years (which then in turn caused one of the great die-offs)
if you keep on watching the program, about 43 minutes in, a scientist describes a calculation he made trying to normalize present “species” extension to what happened back in the past (let’s just say if you watch the video he was alarmed because current die-off rates measured over the past hundred or so years is much greater NOW than what happened in past extension events…
as far as scientists taking the money, kinda have to laugh at that though myself knowing how difficult it is in this culture to study a difficult subject matter (I’m am speaking about the topics of science/math) instead of some bull$shit major like pool-sci (I should know because I double majored as an undergrad physics/poli-sci)
people I know do the hard sciences because they love the subject and kinda discount the love of money (where-as people I know with just pol-sci or just business degrees tend to care much more about the bottom line of making money and are more aware of the prestige)
think about it this way, how many career politicians are lawyers vs scientist
if you bother looking into the topic, what you find is telling is that Scientists Seen as Competent But Not Trusted by Americans because they are not perceived to be friendly or warm because many scientists don’t give a phuck about “social” appearance (I am speaking from my own personal experience)
While 0.6 percent of the U.S. adult population are lawyers, 41 percent of the 113th Congress are. Members of Congress are sixty-eight times as likely as all American adults to have practiced law.
put another way, think what would have happened if the professor was replaced with a politician on gilligan’s island… instead of a great thriving community with inventions
