Strivers and Environmental Nervous Breakdowns.

In the 1980's, I read a piece (newspaper? magazine? I do not recall) related to strivers, namely people who did well in life despite being raised in a bad situation. One case stayed in my mind and involved a mother, her 2 daughters and her son. During dinner, occasionally, the mother would tell the children to stop eating because the food is poisoned. The daughters would be upset and cry while the son kept on eating. The mother and daughters end up in psychiatric care and the son became a well-adjusted man. When asked why he kept on eating, the son said: "I was not dead yet."

The global climate alarmists are like the mother and daughters. A good number of the climate skeptics are like the son. The son looked at past events and made (subconsciouly) a decision based on Bayes' Theory: quite like he is not going to die today. Everyone uses Bayes' Theory everyday: a meteor might strike you dead if you step out of the house but you still do. The exceptions are those suffering from agoraphobia, a condition listed in the psychiatrists' Bible, the DSM (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual).

One looks at the current physico-chemical state of the atmosphere, oceans, and land and asks if disaster is coming. One can look back - through geology, paleobiology, archeology - 2 billions+ years and find instances where the current state is fairly well duplicated. The biologic ecology was different. There has been no warming runaway events. There were some mass extinctions but none from too much warming; most of said extinctions were due to cooling. More on extinctions in a later post.

I want to spend some time on the case of Tuvalu, the poster child of the climate alarmists. Tuvalu is an atoll, a circular-shaped set of coral islands. Darwin was correct in proposing that the atolls originated from coral growth around volcanic or volcanic-like islands (thus the circular-like shape of the islands' positions). By a combination of island sinking (via plate tectonics) and rising sea levels (via warming events) the volcanic layer of Tuvalu is currently more than 1250 meters below sea surface. This means that coral grew 1250 meters tall on top of the volcanic islands. Coral grows somewhere between 1 cm/yr to 10 cm/yr with most corals growing at 3 cm/yr. At 3 cm/yr, 1250 meters translate into
41,700 years. A relative sea level rise of 3cm/yr for 41,700 years is extraordinary so I propose that the coral has emerged from the sea (forming a coral island) several times in past millenia. For coral need to 2 things to live: water (it has to be submerged) and light (it cannot be submerged too deeply).

Currently Tuvalu is about 6 feet above sea level, which tells me that sea level was at least 6 feet higher than it is now. Recently, from what I learned from Internet-land, divers have human artifacts about 40 meters below current sea level. Tuvalu has been inhabited for the past 2000 years. 40 meters imply (at 3 cm/yr) that previously, Tuvalu was totally submerged for at least 1300 years. At the time of the first Egyptians, there may not have been any Tuvalu. So looking back at Tuvalu, some islands emerge, some islands submerge in the grand scheme of things.

People come. People go. Civilizations die and life goes on. Level-headed people (like Bjorn Lomborg) will have Tuvaluans move elsewhere. This action is more direct, more focused, and most economical. The savings in effort and treasure can be put to better use to assist other people.