Plagues

Swarms of locusts devastating East Africa ... and now entering China, the coronavirus approaching a pandemic ... and the African Swine Fever killing hundreds of million pigs in China. These are three of at least eight plagues threatening our world order (I don’t consider earthquakes and volcanoes as plagues) ... see: 10 Plagues for deeper explanations.

So far we haven’t seen a plague of frogs (in a biblical sense) ... but China seems to be suffering the brunt of these catastrophes. For the latest on the coronavirus see: Latest Numbers.

I wish I could predict how all this all was going to turn out ... but in the meantime I am keeping my head down.

Mars

I read recently that the atmosphere of Mars is 95% carbon dioxide ... see: Atmosphere of Mars. This surprised me since the atmosphere here on Earth is only 0.04% CO2. Now I understand that the Martian atmosphere is much thinner (1%) than it is on our planet, but it is still revealing and prompts the following observations:

- Mars obviously has no fossil fuels since it is questionable if it ever supported any life that left a legacy of hydrocarbons ... nor does it have any internal combustion engines. So where did this CO2 come from? The answer must be that there is a natural out-gassing from volcanoes and vents occurring there and, not having any plant life to convert this carbon dioxide to sugar and oxygen over the eons, this gas has kept building up. This also strongly suggest that this process must have happened, and probably still does occur, here on Earth.

- Being that CO2 is a greenhouse gas and given its huge percentage there, the temperature on Mars must be extraordinarily high. But no, it is cold enough there to freeze this CO2 into dry ice around it’s polar regions ... see picture above. Huh?

- Elon Musk is pointing to Mars as being the refuge that we must inhabit to escape from our Earth that is destroying itself with CO2-produced global warming. Why would we seek to flee to a planet that has many thousands of times more percentage of atmospheric carbon dioxide than we have here at home? Do government subsidies for electric cars and rocket ships have anything to do with this?

Afterward: Thinking more about Earthlings settling Mars — Mars obviously has no ozone layer like we do on Earth that protects us from the sun’s lethal cosmic rays. This would complicate the habitation process there enormously ... possibly too enormously.

Air Pollution

I have long read that the major source of new carbon dioxide entering the atmosphere is not humans but natural sources such as volcanoes, the out-gassing of oceans, etc. In fact here is a reference that estimates man’s total current contribution to new CO2 emissions at around 4% … see: Climate Depot Study/.

And scare photos, which are often used to shame us humans about our profligate pollution practices, are the spewing smokestacks of coal-fueled power plants. I invite you dear readers to compare the worst of these photos … in fact the sum total of all that you can summon up on Google Images … with the one satellite image above of a spewing volcano (found on reddit). And this is but one of 50-70 volcanoes that are currently active (this year) and spewing goodly amounts of carbon and sulfur into our atmosphere … see: Volcano Discovery Estimates.

As in many other things in life, reliable data goes a long way toward keeping a level head about the current hysterical arm-waving about global warming (aka, climate change).

Climate Change Horsesh.t

An Effect of Climate Change

CNBC has posted a slideshow listing 10 countries predicted to be hit hard by climate change …see: CNBC Story, The countries that they tag are the Philippines, Nigeria, Vietnam, Haiti, Bangladesh, Papua New Guinea, Malawi, Fiji, Sudan, and Japan. The effects of climate change listed by these Chicken Little’s are typhoons, hurricanes, cyclones, sea-level rising, flooding, and droughts as well as (guffaw) volcanoes, landslides, earthquakes and decreased tourism.

When I was younger these events (except for decreased tourism) used to be called natural disasters, acts of God, or even forces majeure. Now, the climate alarmists have co-opted these things, labeling them “climate change,” and blaming them all on that evil gas, carbon dioxide … the very same gas that is the primary reason that life on Earth is possible. Without it, we would not be here. And these yoyos have gotten the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to dub this gas a “pollutant.” Excuse me, but they all need to go back to school and re-study their science.

CO2