A Few Pointers for the Misguided

I can only assume you know whom I am referring to when I say “misguided.”

Anyway, consider this another one of my debunk articles, although I would have to say this one will be more straightforward and decidedly less organized. I wield my great Hammer of Correction (with +4 Charisma and +5 Poignancy of course!) and take a blunt smack at the lies and idiocy of Republican talking points. But you have all come to expect this here.

• FDR did not prolong the Depression. Hoover did. Same with nature.

This point speaks for itself. The so-called Long Depression of the 1870s lasted a cold five years. The 1830s and 1890s Depressions lasted an equal amount of time. One data point may not make a trend, but I think three certainly does. We can conclude from these examples that the average economic depression will last five years.

As you all know, our most recent depression, the Great Depression, started at the tail end of the Roaring Twenties, after two big down-days in October 1929. This economic tailspin lasted all throughout the 1930s, and did not alleviate until the United States’s entry into World War II in December of 1941. The economy did not really recover until about 1943 however. This would set the length of the Great Depression at 13 or 14 years.

Seeing as an average Depression lasts five years, let’s look at the years of the three Depression presidents’ term lengths.

Calvan Coolidge – 2 August 1923 to 4 March 1929

Herbert Hoover – 4 March 1929 to 4 March 1933

Franklin Delano Roosevelt – 4 March 1933 to 12 June 1945

Needless to say, seeing as the Great Depression started in October of 1929, Herbert Hoover had three and a half years to try and stimulate the economy, nearly 75% of the time it would take a regular depression to run its course. How then is it FDR’s fault that the depression ran for over a decade if Hoover had nearly all the time in a regular depression to fix it?

The main parts of an economy are industry, agriculture, and technology (which at the time was ingrained in industry and agriculture, as new technological advances were for increasing efficiency in the factory and on the farm). Industry was wiped out in 1930 due to economic conditions stemming from recent economic conditions. To put it in other words, people losing their jobs means they don’t have the income to buy factory-produced goods, and the cycle self-deprecates (the “vicious circle”). But agriculture would survive because people need to eat, right?

Cue a little thing called the Dust Bowl. Industry was out of the count, but agriculture survived until the Dust Bowl hit. The Dust Bowl was a barrage of drought and dust-storms between 1931 and 1936, with peak intensity in 1933, (although crop rotation was used, lessening the effects of the vastly-worse 1934 and 1935 storms) coinciding with the all-time bottom in the markets for the Depression.

The Dust Bowl had kicked agriculture to the curb, wiping out crops, ruining soil, and creating food shortages. In addition to ruining agriculture, technology had no economic use, leading to further depreciation in the market. So, I’d say the length of the Great Depression was due in one part to Herbert Hoover and one part to Mother Nature. We voted Hoover out in 1933, but Mother Nature is like a president for life.

• CO2-spurred global warming is not caused by breathing out.

The Insuffrable himself, Glenn Beck is the reason I reference that. In Media Matters’s video entitled “Conservative Misinformation University Salutes the Class of 2009,” Beck is the first recipient, with a clip of him saying that CO2 was “heeeh, hehoehhag,” mimicking inhaling and exhaling. While you could argue that such an occurrance could be due to increasing human population and dwindling plant life on Earth, (remember from ninth-grade biology, the Calvin Cycle?) it is due to increased industrialization and use of dirty-burning fossil fuels such as crude oil.

I now refer to one of my favorite YouTubers. This is the first video in Potholer54’s Climate Change series, the follow-up to his Science Made Easy series. When it comes to the chemicals in the air, some absorb radiation from the sun, warming the air, and some reflect radiation back into space, cooling the air. Some of the chemicals belonging to the former category would be chemicals such as methane, (CH4) water vapor, (H2O) and carbon dioxide (CO2). The main chemical in the latter category would be any nitrogenous oxides, (NO, NO2, N2O) anthropogenic silica, (SiO2) diesel, (C12H23 normally, although there are a few dozen variations on that chemical formula) and gasoline (C8H18).

One argument that could be mounted may go like this. “If we drive so many gas-guzzling cars, then why isn’t the earth cooling?” You see, uncontained aerosols help to dissolve ozone (O3) in the atmosphere. This has created a hole in the ozone layer the size of Antarctica, which is slowly recovering due to the banning of aerosol-emitting containers.

• Cold temperatures in the winter are not the antithesis to global warming.

I am in utter disbelief at the number of uneducated morons who think that the fact that it gets cold in the winter is disproof to anthropogenic climate change. You see, with the increase in global temperature, it will still get cold in the winter. Yes, it will still snow as well, preserving the ever-pleasant snow day. However, instead of the yearly temperature range in Chicago being -15C in January and 38C in July, it will be -14C in January and 39C in July. This brings me to my next point….

• One degree net change is larger than you may think.

I remember the One Degree campaign by the Weather Channel (unfortunately discontinued since the NBC Universal takeover, which managed to take the weather and make it even more boring than it already is) to make people aware of climate change. They said that as of 2006 (so we’re going back three years, before actually giving a care about climate change became a fad replete with poseurs) the net temperature of the earth has risen by 1 degree Celsius since 1970.

Why is this a problem? Well, you see,  according to New Scientist’s 27 September 2006 article, aptly entitled “One Degree and We’re Done For,” we are sitting on the threshold of irreversible climate change that will not be deterred by introducing alternative energy like wind turbine, solar photovoltaic, or geothermal. The presence of CO2 will linger at levels that cannot be cleared. (According to the article, the average rate of warming by decade is 0.2 degrees Celsius.)

In addition, while the 1 degree Celsius is the global average, the temperatures in permafrosted areas like Siberia and Alaska have risen 2 to 3 degrees Celsius since 1970. This has caused the length of the warm season (spring and summer) to lengthen by two weeks. In addition, the perma- aspect of permafrost is being eroded away, leading to melting of ice in those regions. I do not advocate a scenario like the one in the 2002 film The Day After Tomorrow where the melting of ice caps and ice in Arctic Circle regions causes a cataclysmic breakdown of environmental conditions, but it will cause water levels to rise, increasing the amount of water vapor in the air (vicious circle all over again) and flooding coastal regions. This is especially devastating to coastal countries and territories; estimates have circulated that half of the Netherlands is to be underwater by the year 2050, a scant 40 years from now. You can run away to your PACs and fundraisers, but you can’t run away from the truth.

• Peak oil will happen/has happened. You can run away to your PACs and fundraisers, but you can’t run away from the truth.

Readers, I am not certain if you are familiar with the concept of peak oil.  To state it simply, the output of oil over a period of time can be expressed on a bell curve.  The first oil strike in Pennsylvania in 1859 starts the graph, and over a period of years, the output levels will rise like a parabola until reaching a top point, then eventually winding down as oil levels deplete. The top is called “peak oil.”

I don’t mean to pitch a situation into a black-and-white scenario, but the way it is is that if you can admit that crude oil reserves are finite on Earth (which is true, no way around it) then there will be a point when they deplete. No way around it (I repeat). However, the point of depletion has been disputed with estimates ranging from 2030 most pessimisticly to 2250 most optimisticly. But the point still holds: oil reserves will run out.

This is important because we need to save crude oil for what’s important. We can run a car on a non-fossil fuel derived source, (such as electric from geothermal, solar photovoltaic, or wind turbine) but we can’t synthesize asphalt or paraffin wax any other way. We need to devote our oil resources to where it’s irreplacable.

You know what? Four Five (ack, can’t count today) more points debunked. Keep on bringing them at me, folks. I’m done for the night.