I was watching a show about Yosemite on NatGeo tonight. I wasn’t disappointed with the images of that most beautiful place on earth.
I was eventually driven to turn it off early, however, by the incessant invoking of the “climate change” and “global warming” twin bogeymen.
In the most ridiculous part, a segment was devoted to the “research” being conducted by nitwits from UC Berkeley (where else?) to study the effects of global warming on the giant sequoias. Students climbed to the tops of the giants and took sample greenery to check the evaporation rate of the water pumped up constantly through the trees’ trunks from the roots hundreds of feet below. The theory went that this was to check how global warming could result in disruption of the this pumping mechanism.
This is activism masquerading as science. Without a control — a sample from before this dreaded global warming began — the data from today is worthless, assuming you believe global warming has already begun. What’s more, the notion that a degree or two of difference in the average temperature could have any effect here is absurd on its face, since swings of much more than that have been survived by these goliaths for hundreds of years. Finally, at one point it was shared that the expectation was that the sun would be hotter because of global warming, and that this would be one cause of the disruption of the water pumping cycle. Exactly what mechanism of man’s carbon-driven evil would cause the sun to be hotter?
I wish there were gaming involving “research” like this, because I would put a pot of money on the advocates — sorry, students — finding that we need much more government spending and bureaucracy to save the giant sequoia.