OMG, the Patriots won the Super Bowl! Who could have predicted that?
Actually, since they employ the smartest coach and the best player of all-time, many people could have predicted it. After all, they go to the Big Game virtually every year and win most of the ones that they go to. Until Belichick and Brady retire, the Pats are probably odds-on-favorites to win the Super Bowl each and every year.
Some things are predictable, like tonight’s State of the Union speech by President Trump. I predict that he will act Presidential and welcome all Americans to work together to solve our many pressing problems. I further predict that, no later than the following day, he will set about disparaging Democrats, minorities, the Press, and even those in his own political party who would dare disagree with his myopic vision for America.
Just predictin’.
Speaking of predicting, how about those weathermen who correctly predicted, almost a week in advance, that a nasty Polar Vortex would sweep down from the Arctic into the Midwest and deliver a sub-freezing gut punch to Americans from Chicago to the East Coast. Sunofagun if those nerds weren’t right!
Now, how did those weather guys know what was coming? In a word: science.
Science is the stuff that has brought us useful things like aspirin, cell phones, plastic, jet airplanes, electricity, duct tape, brain surgery, porn movies, and virtually every other thing that human beings use on a daily basis.
Humankind has advanced knowledge since the Enlightenment (i.e. when people stopped asking religion how things actually worked) by adhering to the Scientific Method. It involves asking a question, doing research, constructing a hypothesis, testing the hypothesis through experimentation, analyzing the data and drawing a conclusion, and sharing the conclusion with others.
Typically, many other researchers are studying the same question, and they share their data and conclusions. This is called peer review, involving scrutiny by other experts in the field. Sometimes, the experiments are flawed, or the analysis is lacking, and the scientist (the researcher) will be called-out for a faulty conclusion. This is actually a good thing, because identifying the wrong answer can sometimes be just as important as finding the right answer.
Scientists have been studying the atmospheric chemistry and physics for hundreds of years. The resulting findings from the thousands of experiments and observations has allowed meteorologists to accurately predict the weather phenomena coming our way, be it a heat wave, a hurricane, extreme high tides, snowfall, etc. Although weather prediction isn’t 100 percent accurate, it’s pretty damned accurate. If the forecast calls for a tornado in your community, it would be best to keep alert, with eyes to the sky.
The same scientists (the group of worldwide researchers) who have fine-tuned our meteorological models have almost unanimously (97%) warned that the earth’s climate is dangerously warming due to increased levels of “greenhouse gasses” in the atmosphere. These pollutants are man-made, generated primarily by the burning of fossil fuels for industry, agriculture, and transportation.
According to scientists throughout the world, the impact of a warming earth on human civilization could be catastrophic, if not addressed immediately. Melting arctic ice floes, glaciers, and permafrost will have significant impacts on sea level, ocean currents, weather patterns, and, as such, will change climates throughout the world. Droughts, famines, forest fires, flooding, species extinction, and severe weather events (like tornadoes and hurricanes) will become more commonplace. This scenario has already begun.
We can expect to see more instances of last week’s Polar Vortex.. This is because global warming will impact the Jet Stream, an atmospheric (high altitude) wind which steers weather patterns across the globe. When this high altitude fixture is disrupted, or split, extreme cold weather can penetrate the U.S. from arctic regions. Counterintuitively, this is how an extreme cold event can derive from global “warming”.
The United States, under President Donald Trump, is the only industrialized nation on earth which disputes the scientifically-established fact of global warming. Rather than leading the developed nations in addressing this mortal danger to humanity, America insists on pretending that global warming is a hoax.
This kind of “head in the sand” approach to facts is, unfortunately, standard operating procedure for the Trump Administration. Opinions, particularly those of the President (and his Fox News advisors), are the basis for policy, rather than facts.
Of course, if aggressive steps were taken to curtail the pollution of the atmosphere by greenhouse gasses, Big Oil would sell less petroleum and industrial polluters might have to retrofit their factories with exhaust scrubbers. There would be societal costs, for sure.
Then, again, there were societal costs when we took on the Nazis and the Japanese. We were world leaders back then.
Predictably, President Trump will not address the global warming issue, an existential one for mankind, in his State of the Union Address tonight. He will, instead, focus his attention on a fake issue, which is the imagined invasion of the United States by terrorists, rapists, murderers, and lazy bums from Latin American countries.
A medieval wall is the answer to all of our problems, the Ostrich-in-Chief will say.