So Steve emails me some spam he got about how the Iceland volcano is reversing global warming caused by humans and says, “Hey, wanna do a fast debunk of this on the blog?” To which I reply,
Who has fucking time to debunk shit?? Do you have any idea how much time I spent stuck in traffic today? Half of it! The day I mean. In traffic, chugging slowly through construction zones. Cars suck assholes. Next time we come here we do everything by public transit. If it isn’t on a bus route or the LRT line we don’t fucking see it. I don’t care how closely related by blood the person is. And don’t say how I should write this rant up as a blog post. I have to choke down some pasta then get back into the car and drive to my sister’s house. When I finally get back to my dad’s basement I’m turning on the television and watching reality shows until I’m unconscious.
See, I’m back in Stabmonton. And today we stupidly tried to travel from my folks’ place in the nearby suburb of St Albert to the south side of Edmo using the spiff new Anthony Henday Drive. Problem being the construction zone on the Henday ran from just outside St Albert all the way to the north shore of the North Saskatchewan River. All told, that’s a whopping 17 km of construction zone, with all the attendant reduced speed warnings and bottlenecks.
And as Google Maps informs me, that’s five km longer than the entire length of Albert Street (in Regina, of course). And, on the way back to my folks’, we discovered that there is also massive construction on Calgary Trail North and the Whitemud. In other words, pretty much every route through or around Edmonton is clotted by huge construction projects. So when I get home I don’t want to hear any whinging about how the summer construction season is snarling up Regina’s traffic.
17 km! One construction zone! That’s Traffic Perdition I just escaped. A one-block detour around the City Square project is looking pretty fucking insignificant by comparison.
As for that spam email from Whitworth, it was some balderdash about how material spewed from the volcano in Iceland wipes out four years worth of human-spewed CO2, or some such bullshit. The Guardian helpfully put paid to that idea over a year ago, pointing out that the biggest impact on the climate from that eruption comes as a result of all the European aircraft that were grounded (air travel being notoriously bad for the environment, so much so that one cross-country roundtrip by plane produces as much carbon as your average year’s worth of car-driving).
That Steve’s spammer invokes Ian Plimer in the headline should have been indication enough that the email was to be ignored. I’m not entirely sure why it got his knickers in a twist. (He said it was sent by a “journalist.” And now I’m curious who exactly.) But just so there’s no confusion: Plimer (who made our Dastardly Denier list) is not a trusted name in the world of climate science. Here are, for instance, a list of rebuttals to his anti-climate-science tome, Heaven + Earth. Or you can watch as George Monbiot takes him to task on Australian TV.
