The Weather...

Source: International Business Times

Topics: Commentary, Carl Sagan, Climate Change, Cosmos, Weather

This winter has been quite amusing lately.

I've watched the armchair meteorologists inveigh that politicians have seen their "Napoleonic Waterloo" with regards to how they respond (or, don't respond) to storms predicted to be dangerous to the public.

Also dangerous to the public is the sensationalism storms have taken for the Neanderthal Nielsen Ratings - created when we only had ABC, CBS, NBC and a few UHF channels, not Amazon, Netflix and Hulu. We are all taking in information - some of it, vital to our survival - in myriad ways via the Internet and the aforementioned technologies it empowers, plus the thousand of distracting channels, many of which you can listen to music exclusively.

Case in point: last week's Blizzard Juno, that turned out thankfully to be a bust. Comparisons to Katrina were abundant prior to the nor'easter landfall. It was also amusing that the very pundits that suggested under-reaction to the storm would be disastrous were disappointed when the storm bypassed New York, but did considerable damage to Connecticut and Massachusetts. The streets across the state of New York were sufficiently empty enough for the snow plows to do their work, and we were back up and traveling fine in about a day. I for one, was very happy with the overreaction.  It's really bad when it comes down to this: http://on.msnbc.com/1Lj4zgy

Here's the career page of the American Meteorological Society as well as National Geographic's Education Page on Meteorology. That is related to, but completely different from climate science. It seems antithetical that you'd have devastating storms with a warming globe. The key to understanding is what would our weather be if this moisture was instead of being in the warming air, it was where it originated at the poles (Arctic and Antarctic in this case)?

Science is always trying to make itself accessible to the general public. Carl Sagan opined it is imperative to the whole enterprise of a democratic republic. The reboot of COSMOS was another modern attempt and many other popular shows attempt to "crack this nut." However, the US is increasingly hostile to all science, not just climate science, but the very kind that makes us a superpower in a global society that is dependent on quickly assessing information and acting on it accordingly, decisively and correctly. Our very futures could be balanced on this narrow precipice between prosperity and poverty.

We may sadly find ourselves behind in twenty to fifty years in a technological "race to the bottom" - back to the dark ages of authoritarianism, crack pots, pixie dust, rabbits' feet, snake oil salesmen,  voodoo and root workers.

"We The People": it was a good idea while it lasted.