Saturday, November 24, 2018

For the Record: McArdle on Climate Change



This video is so funny and at the same time so deeply frightening, like a Buñuel film. [Update: It's not Venice, obviously, as Arundel notes in comments: turns out to be Tenerife, in the Canary Islands, and the video is doctored. I stand by my Buñuel remark.]  It probably wouldn't bother Megan McArdle:


She'd calmly point out that Venetians [or Canarios as the case may be] in the pre-Cambrian era managed to make it through. Oh wait, there was no life, plant or animal, on land at the time, so perhaps nobody minded in those days. The hard-shelled creatures that had just started evolving at the end of the period, 540 million years ago, might have enjoyed watching the coasts wash away.




The spectacle of people of moderate intelligence choosing to be stupid, for some kind of short-term gain, at the price of contributing to the doom of Venice, Bangladesh, and all the world's polar bears, is incomprehensible to me. Rushing out to jump on this particular stupid train the day the report comes out, as if she's afraid she might miss it if she, I don't know, wasted an hour looking at the report and acquiring a sense of the evidence that this coastal erosion is radically different than anything that has happened during the anthropic era, is beyond belief. I just don't even know what to say. (Update: I should say that, as commenter thundermonkey points out, the tweet is two and a half years old, so it's most probably not related to the report at all.)

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