NDT succeeded Bill Gutsch as the director of Hayden Planetarium. Bill was a HS Classmate of mine. I took over presidency of the School Science Club from him the year after Bill graduated (in our school's inaugural graduating class). We worked together on smaller rocketry projects. Our school was experimental honor school; we took College courses instead of Summer Vacations.
NDT is from The Bronx and talks about setting up telescopes for kids in Van Cortlandt park. That's the same area I spent a fair amount of my earlier youth in during the early 1950's. He does truly meaningful good for the youth in the region and they need it and a lot more like it.
He's an obviously decent guy and brilliantly entertaining, but would appear to have been infected by the global climate issue while getting an otherwise agreeable education. Be that as it may, he sticks to his beliefs, an admirable trait regardless. This trait put a bit of a political pall over my enjoyment of his otherwise highly commendable revival of Cosmos.
My only objection is to any sort of politics polluting an otherwise immensely scholarly work. Bully Pulpit and all...
Get this straight, climate change is a definite given. It's happening, and probably to the full extent that is so loudly touted.
My objection is that I seriously believe it's essentially a natural event. We are in the final stages of an Ice Age. Warming is a normal part of that.
Ascribing such an immensely powerful event to the puny works of man is well past borderline ludicrous, IMHO. Mankind is far from angelic, but even the works of Ozymandias are short shrift when comparing comparing against the recurring upheavals of simple, basic nature at its most normal.
The most serious lacking is in the dismissal by CC advocates of the very effective natural controls and buffers that exist in nature to cope with the causes and means of even the more abnormal aspects of cyclic and normal climate change.
For example, the effects of CFC's are significant. But we caused them, and we're also fixing them; what man can do, man can undo. But CO2 is mostly a natural cause and effect, just the worldwide body mass of termites alone produces CO2 in abundances that hugely dwarf human caused CO2 emission, was doing so for millions of years before even the earliest progenitors of modern man walked the planet; and the weather and ocean cycles just resets the process the same way nature has always done.
Nature has the issues largely, if not completely and totally, in hand. We can help, but taking us back to the bronze age is just plain imbecilic.
Cow farts, indeed...
Likewise the puny efforts of which mankind is capable in the effort to reverse such massive change. We simply lack the wherewithal to either cause or reverse such implacable natural engines of change, and the entire process has become co-opted for political purposes by the socially derelict and their unwitting shills.
...Plus a few mouthy morons in Congress...
Demanding that humanity has a meaningful role or even a realistic capability in CC amelioration is hubris at its most stupendous excess, and an unprincipled grab for political power (and wealth) within the midst of all the ensuing confusion. It's primed for failure, and that failure as a justification for unending escalation of the ensuing hysteria.
Who are the Despicables, now...?
Greg
