Thursday, February 11, 2010

jaded

I laughed at a book I saw in the stacks the other day. Beneath the tattered cellophane bookcover, the title screamed "ACID RAIN!" in that prototypical 1980's new wave font. Poor acid rain, I thought. No one cares about you anymore. Weren't all of our cars supposed to be disintegrated into toxic piles of damp, rusty sludge by now? (Since, you know, we all seemed to have survived the population bomb.)

So between the global warming that has somehow turned into zOMG! Snowmageddon!, the autism/vaccine hoax, and now the uproar over third-hand smoke, I've started to become skeptical about all of this science business.

The earth is still round, right? Water is still wet?

21 comments:

Tam said...

As I see it?

If it describes what is, it is science.

If it describes how someone wants it to be, it's "Science!©"

The two can be most easily distinguished by the latter's rich, luxurious grant plumage.

Jay G said...

Hey, don't forget about the hole in the ozone layer. That was supposed to fry us all in our sleep, remember?

Weer'd Beard said...

Acid rain was supposed to kill off all the Amphibians and sterilize ponds too.

I remember hearing a LOT of tree-frogs last summer...maybe they're acid resistant SUPER-FROGS!

Kinda like BATTLETOADS!!!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battletoads

Fred said...

As a geographer, I can assure you the Earth is still a roughly round shaped object.

Rustmeister said...

There is some debate in the scientific community as to how wet water actually is.

Rev. Paul said...

The sun still comes up in the east, too. But I expect - any day now - a grant to study what would happen if it comes up in the west.

Here's a hint: shadows would face the wrong way.

Anonymous said...

Oh, yeah - I remember acid rain now. By the time I became old enough to rent a car in my own name, we were supposed to live in an environment where nobody could go outside anytime it rained, ever, because it would melt our faces off our skulls...or something. I dunno.

Christina RN LMT said...

Acid rain was a big problem in Germany, I remember. A lot of the trees in the Black Forest were killed by it. Dunno what it's like there now. Oh, and we had Chernobyl fall-out, too! Fun times. ;)

W/V motive...what's the motive for the faking of Global Warming? Money and power, the big two.

Anonymous said...

Damn....Living in Florida all these years made me think the world was flat, but lots of wet water with a salt chaser.

See Ya

Comrade Misfit said...

Acid rain was a problem in the Northeast. If you were growing hay, it took spreading about two tons of lime per acre of grassland every few years to counteract the effects of acid rain, if you wanted to grow good-quality hay for critter feed. The installation of scrubbers on the coal-fired plants out your way helped a lot.

Anonymous said...

You fell for that "Earth is round" hoax too? Sheep.




I seem to have gotten my tongue caught in my cheek. Can I get some help here?

W/V: Butatize? No comment.

Anonymous said...

Um... "Quotes" were supposed to be aournd "Cheek". Way to blow a joke Dante. *sigh*


JACKPOT! W/V Sterrain: What they did to make acid rain safe.

Anonymous said...

You're not suggesting buffo...scientists would spin their findings to whatever is advantageous to their getting grant money, are you?

The horror.

Jim

LabRat said...

Both acid rain and the hole in the ozone layer were genuine threats that were fixed by some relatively trivial shifts in industrial practices. The hole is still there, it's just shrinking now because we don't truly need and never truly did need the propellants that caused it in the first place. Likewise, acid rain was caused by an excess of a gas it's not really necessary to have as a byproduct of coal burning. I imagine China still has issues with it.

The lack of awareness of these victories is one of many complete failures I lay at the feet of the "green" movement, which is currently worshipping Chicken Little.

Tam said...

LabRat,

Too bad James P. Hogan went all nutty and Velikovskian later, since in some people's eyes that automatically scribbles a hand-teleprompter on all his earlier stuff, but he did an interesting piece on the ozone hole in Omni back in the early '90s. The highlights are available online.

Brian K Miller said...

Acid rain is still a major problem. Winds carry coal burning byproducts from China and North Korea and dump toxic rainfall in Japan and South Korea as well as the Canadian and American west coast from Alaska to the Baja California pennisula. In some places entire forests show acid rain damage to trees in areas stretching for hundreds of miles around.

It hasn't gone away at all, but for some reason the media and the modern scientific community don't report anything related to problems resulting from unmitigated Chinese industrialization. If they can't blame the United States and Europe they don't bother reporting it.

Anonymous said...

"If they can't blame the United States and Europe they don't bother reporting it."

It's only pollution-pollution when Capitalists cause it. Kinda like only groundlings can really "rape-rape".

Crucis said...

And you found them in the Fantasy/Science Fiction section?

Kristophr said...

These days, Breda, a Global Dirt Shortage, and Anthropogenic Plate Tectonics are competing for position as the new pseudo science to replace Global Warming.

Anonymous said...

Acid Rain is sooo 1980's. I'm still waiting for that New Ice Age that the doomsayers back in the '70s were saying would doom us all.

Oh, wait just a minute there...

Joseph said...

Chapter 40 of The Feynman Lectures on Physics is called "The flow of dry water."

As for the Next Crisis, I think Peak Phosphorus is the most likely source of hysteria.