Abby Gruen The Star Ledger

August 8, 2010

Abby Gruen
The Star Ledger
Star Ledger Plaza
Newark, NJ 07102

RE: Global Warming, Global Cooling and what do I do with my Ptolemy is Tops tee shirts and bumper stickers? Some comments and questions on your article on geophysicist Wally Broecker in today’s Star Ledger

Ms. Gruen,

As a Garden state émigré I check the Jersey papers to see who died, to see who has been indicted, and who died because they were indicted. I’m from Bayonne so I’ve always been able to tell the buttered side from the dry. One of the serendipities of my thanatoptic quest is that I come across articles like yours about Professor Broecker. He is part of the unbroken line of Columbia University scholar, scholars such as Michael Garrett, Robert Jastrow, Harry Politi, and Whittaker Chambers

A word or two before leaving, as Jacques Barzun would say.

#1 – You say he is the Father of Global Warming. To be precise, as only a non-scientist can be, he is the father of the name Global Warming.

#2 – Professor Broecker sounds like a fascinating man. A scientist with world wide acclaim with the common touch – Remember it was Einstein who always wanted someone to prove him wrong so he “could get on to something else” – worthy of your praise. You lessen your praise of him by including huzzahs from Professor Jeffrey Sachs, alas, also of Columbia University. Sachs, a multi-degreed horse’s ass of Guinness Book notice, thinks that the solution to 2,000,000 sub-Saharan Black infant deaths each year, every year is $10 mosquito netting and the transfer of at least 1% of the GDP to scurrilous shamans and snake oil grifters who, having found a bad situation, have made it exponentially worse.

#3 – If Professor Broecker challenged the established norm of generally accepted science, a pseudo science predicated on Luddism, Lysenkoism, and a total disregard for something called the scientific method, in the 1970s, he should be honored for standing athwart bubble gum science and yelling “Stop”.

#4 – You should have mentioned that the dominating scientific urban legend of the 1970s – gators in the sewers, stuff like that – was Global Cooling.

Paul Ehrlich, PhD, wrote a book called the The Population Bomb in 1968. By the early ‘70s he was a regular on the Johnny Carson show. He was lionized [there’s that Columbia connection again] by the media. His book had a simple premise. There was a

race whose finish line was the year 2000. We would either starve to death or we would freeze to death.

I submit the following facts. File them under empirical evidence:
A - It is August 8, 2010.
B - On Thursday past I was told by my internist to lose weight.
As to B, I told him that I would be worshipped as a God in many countries. He agreed but he also said that this wasn’t one of them.

Do you remember the Club of Rome? Talk about a modern day Jeremiah! Their predictions, issued in the mid-70s, didn’t think we would make it to the year 2000. We were running out of everything. We had enough helium, hazel nuts, leisure suits, potash, and plankton to make it to the end of next year but only if we cut back now.

If Professor Broecker opposed that gang of Yahoos wearing wire hangars wrapped in aluminum foil who proudly wore decoder rings he should be proclaimed as the 20th Century Galileo.

#5 – “Climate is what we expect; weather is what we get.”
Here’s a pop quiz.
How did Greenland get its name?
An acceptable answer is because it was “green”, as in green pastures.

1000 years ago there was a spike in temperature in Europe. I know, unlike the sky is falling non-thinkers with a public forum, that correlation is not causation. Warmer temperatures mean that more land becomes arable. More arable land leads to more protein. More protein leads to smarter people. At the end of the spike we got the Renaissance. Do you have a problem with Dante?

#6 - There is a logical fallacy that tree hugging loons, and let’s put the reigning bird brain, former Vice President Alpha Gump, in the top limb, that the sky is falling ohmadahns cling to like it was their personal anti-gravity device. Post hoc ergo propter hoc didn’t make any sense when Aristotle told us about it. It still doesn’t. All the fear mongering Professors aping Chicken Little by telling us that the Sky is Falling at 125 decibels can’t make it so.

An absence of critical thinking produces mind numbing results.

President Clinton told a press conference in the Rose Garden in August, 1996 that it was a very hot day. He then told us that the August heat in DC was caused by Global Warming. On a roll, partly because no one ever said “Huh?” he then told us that Global Warming was caused by – you guessed it – hot days in August in Washington. Things like that can give tautologies a bad name.

#7 – An unusually cold winter here has had one beneficial effect. A large number of non-native species, critters like rock pythons and striped iguanas, died. How did this cold winter happen here if all the really smart people say that man has put his world wide microwave on overdrive? Should we revisit Ehrlich’s premise?

#8 – I must confess that one of my secret vices in the late ‘70s was discharging some peripatetic Right Guard out my bathroom window. Since I was told by my betters that January 1, 2000 was going to be a non-event I decided to pole-ax the already endangered ozone layer. Why prolong the agony particularly if women and minorities would suffer disproportionately? Try as I did we’re still standing.

It could be that Faulkner was on to something.

“I believe that not only will man endure: he will prevail.”

Go figure.






Kevin Smith


PS – The last time I was in Newark the Star Ledger Plaza looked like it could repel Somali pirates be they land based or sea. Has the Star Ledger put a moat in yet?