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About Constancio Asumen, Jr.
Mr. Asumen has most recently assumed the responsibilities of
Chairman-of-the-Board for ACE LILACS, a budding startup venture
in the marketplace of ideas. The list of previous vocations he
had engaged in before this, includes being a farmer, fisherman,
stevedore, national scholar, college professor, journeyman
laborer, freelance scribe, typesetter, proofreader, systems
analyst, software developer, cab driver, etc. He holds a masters
degree in Mineral Science & Technology (1973, Kyoto University)
with a major in Exploration Geophysics. Somewhat of the
quintessential Ivy League under-achiever, he is an embodiment of
the can-do attitude so prevalent amongst most first generation
Americans. He is an ardent adherent to the tenet that anything
worth doing is worth doing well. Mr. Asumen maintains a
website here. |
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Past Articles
Consensus
Does Not a Science Make
Historical
Parallels & Intersections
The
Repugnant Obama Paradigm
The Myth of
Moderate Islam
ObamaCare:
How Lucky Can You Get?
Assimilation Overkill Begets Bigotry |
Social Bookmarking
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Constancio Asumen,
Jr.
Consensus Does Not a Science Make
November 27, 2009
"The
fault, dear Brutus, lies not in our stars, but in
ourselves...”
– Shakespeare
The "fault,” at this juncture, is giving
credibility to Al Gore. It was understandable that Bill Clinton would
sell Al Gore as a presidential timber. When he was picked for Vice
President, I chalked it up to Clinton’s attempt at getting a life
insurance policy. With Al Gore in line for succession to the Oval
Office, who was going to want to harm a President William Jefferson
Clinton? The Democrats have such a perverted sense of reality.
The point is, after reading Al Gore’s,
Earth in the Balance, it is one of the few "wonders of the
world” that anybody could give Al Gore an iota of credibility. That book
established Gore’s credentials, beyond any shadow of a doubt, as a
certifiable charlatan. But then again, not very many people may have
read it. (Full disclosure: I got it from a $1-book stand and I read it
commuting to/from work in the NYC subway.)
Some might deem it an exercise in
futility to focus on Al Gore at this juncture in history. With the
advent of the transformational, transcendent Obama, Gore himself is
history. I wish it were quite that simple and harmless. Gore, being the
self-proclaimed high priest of Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) duly
ordained by the Nobel Peace Prize Committee, has successfully charmed
the public into accepting his balderdash as gospel.
The same intellectual dysfunction and
disconnect that were dismissive of Earth in the Balance have
embraced the movie
An Inconvenient Truth and allowed it to creep into our
educational system. It is analogous to making Earth in the Balance
a required reading material for high school seniors as a pre-requisite
for graduation.
It is noteworthy that this same
dysfunction allowed the elevation of BHO to the Oval Office to become
the Ditherer-in-chief and
make America the laughing stock of the world, not to mention the de
facto betrayal of our troops who are holding forth in Afghanistan.
It matters little that Al Gore is
gallivanting around the globe with his huge ‘Carbon Footprint’
making millions of dollars in the process, peddling
fictitious literature billed as gospel. What is most crucial is that
the Obama regime with all the powers and resources of the Federal
Government at its disposal is buying into and
espousing the Al Gore agenda hook, line and sinker. Anybody who
dares to sound a note of alarm or caution is vilified as naysayers
intent on obstructing the President, or worse, as racist opposing the
President’s agenda because he happens to be black.
It behooves to keep in mind that one of
the premises of An Inconvenient Truth is the mantra that the
science of Global Warming is a settled issue. That there is an
overwhelming consensus within the scientific community does not make the
belief a well established body of knowledge. Science is
not a matter of faith and consensus. It is a matter of verifiable facts
and phenomena that can be replicated repeatedly under carefully
controlled constraints.
It used to be that scientific theory was established by a preponderance
of verifiable evidence. Not anymore. In the age of Gore and Obama,
science is established by a preponderance of repeated incantation,
followed by a preponderance of favorable media coverage.
Consensus does not a science make.
"Carbon footprint” and "carbon offset” are not scientific concepts. They
are political constructs, concocted for propaganda, designed to
politically and financially benefit their proponents. It has as much
basis in reality as did mortgage-backed securities which obliterated the
real estate market and the entire financial system needed a
multi-billion dollar bailout.
Beneath the Veneer of Hypocritical
Rhetoric
Anthropogenic Global
Warming, as postulated by the Kyoto Protocol is not even a
scientific theory.
It is only an unprovable hypothesis.
The notion of
"Greenhouse Effect" postulated in the context of the entire planet earth
is, at best, an extrapolation of boundary value conditions, not
otherwise warranted by experimental constraints.
It is the process of experimentation
that elevates an hypothesis into a theory, i.e., when replicable results
supportive of the hypothesis are obtained, repeatedly. No such
experimentation has been deployed in support of Anthropogenic Global
Warming. A computer simulation is not an experiment. It is nothing but
an exercise in modeling reality. Its validity depends largely on the set
of assumptions that govern the set of process relationships stipulated
in the model. It does not prove anything, by any stretch of the
imagination.
At the time of this writing, there is a
brewing scandal surrounding the apparent falsification of
‘scientific’ data by the Climate Research Unit at the University of East
Anglea in the UK, known to be the intellectual brain thrust for AGW. It
is a breach of protocol governing scientific inquiry that would have
warranted sending the offenders to the stakes, if not for the fact that
doing so would be a serious sacrilege to the noble memory of
Giordano Bruno.
For the sake of pedagogical integrity,
let us disregard the potential ramifications of such a scandal and
confine ourselves to verifiable facts. Carbon dioxide
accounts for 0.0314 vol % of the atmosphere and ranks fourth in the
distribution after nitrogen, oxygen, and argon. This amount constitutes
1.5% of the total carbon dioxide content of the atmosphere and
hydrosphere, the dissolved component accounting for 98.5% of the total.
People exhale carbon dioxide all their
lives. Lower forms of being in the biosphere generously discharge it
from the other end, an activity most notably attributed to cattle.
Plants use it in photosynthesis. Coral reefs use it to produce more
coral reefs, to eventually become limestone and marble, eons hence.
With all these multitude of phenomena in
which carbon dioxide is involved, where is the research that isolates in
a quantifiable format, the human contribution? The answer appropriately
brings to mind a quatrain from
Omar Khayyam:
LVII:
When You and I behind the Veil are past,
Oh but the long long while the World shall last,
Which of our Coming and Departure heeds
As much as Ocean of a pebble-cast.
Notwithstanding the bloated egos of most
politicians and some punditocrats, our physical universe as pertains to
the planet earth, is still heliocentric. Much of what is going that
affects the temperature mostly is influenced by solar activity, or lack
thereof.
Temperature fluctuations are well
documented in the historical geologic record. They are somewhat loosely
correlated with solar
magnetic storms or sun spots (emphasis mine):
"At over 1.4 million kilometers (869,919
miles) wide, the Sun contains 99.86 percent of the mass of the entire
solar system: well over a million Earths could fit inside its
bulk. The total energy radiated by the Sun averages 383 billion trillion
kilowatts, the equivalent of the energy generated by 100 billion tons of
TNT exploding each and every second.”
Not even all the messianic powers of
Barack Hussein Obama, reinforced by all the major bloviators in Capitol
Hill (think Nancy Pelosi, Barney Frank, Harry Reid, Chuck Schumer, etc.)
has any prayer of reversing the influence of these staggering numbers.
So, where does the urgent call to action by the Global Warmists come
from? Let’s take a look at another, rather longer,
historical record (emphasis mine):
"Based on a combination of historical
trends over the last several thousand years with the recent
trends reasonably attributable to anthropogenic causes of temperature
increase, it appears that some small additional increase might be
reasonably possible (but not certain) by 2100, but most likely within a
range < 0.4OC, which would put it in the range of several
warm periods in historical times that were particularly productive
times.”
On a normal day in either winter or summer, when my HVAC system is
engaged in the house, I suffer through a greater temperature variation
going from the first floor couch to my computer room on the second
floor. The answer is painfully obvious. The urgency is analogous to the
need to pass the stimulus bill of thousands of pages without being read,
let alone analyzed by those who have to vote on it.
To propose to deploy inordinate
resources for Global Warming is political folly worthy of celebration
only in The United Nations. Let American taxpayers not have anything to
do with it.
The more relevant questions would be:
why is President Obama so invested in downsizing the power and capacity
of the American economic system? Whose errand is he running, in the name
of a hoax? What does he aim to accomplish by wrecking America? |
