RUSH: Dadelut dadelut dadelut dadelut dadelut dadelut dadelut. It’s update time, ladies and gentlemen, global warming update time. This is Algore, as portrayed by Shanklin.
(Playing of What a Horrible World.)
That is the white comedian Paul Shanklin and the vocal portrayal there of former vice president Algore and the takeoff on Louis Armstrong’s great song, What a Wonderful World. All right, this Global Warming Stack is just too good. But first off, from the Miami Herald today: ”Hurricane Predictions Missed the Mark.’ — Two years ago, way under. Last year, way over. This year, still not right. It’s been a stormy few years for William Gray, Philip Klotzbach and other scientists who predict total hurricane activity before each season begins, which raises fundamental questions as the 2007 season draws to an end on Friday: Why do they bother? And given the errors — which can undermine faith in the entire hurricane warning system — are these full-season forecasts doing more harm than good? ‘The seasonal hurricane forecasters certainly have a lot of explaining to do,” said Max Mayfield, former director of the National Hurricane Center. ‘The last couple of years have humbled the seasonal hurricane forecasters and pointed out that we have a lot more to learn before we can do accurate seasonal forecasts,’ he said.
‘The numbers provide abundant support for those statements. Just before the season started on June 1, the nationally prominent Gray-Klotzbach team at Colorado State University predicted that 17 named storms would grow into nine hurricanes, five of which would be particularly intense, with winds above 110 mph. A different team at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration predicted 13 to 17 named storms, seven to 10 hurricanes and three to five intense hurricanes. The actual results for the 2007 season: 14 named storms, five hurricanes, two intense hurricanes,’ both of them hit the Yucatan, none of them hit here. ‘That turned a season predicted to be extremely active into one that was about average in number of storms and well below average in total intensity.’ Now, what is not addressed here in this story, of course, is the global warming aspect, and we have to exempt Gray. Gray does not believe that global warming has anything to do with hurricanes, either frequency or intensity, but the environmentalist wackos do, and after Katrina, they were making all these predictions they’re going to get worse, and worse, and worse, and it was a central point in Gore’s movie.
And so, you can ask the question: Look, if they have no clue about the seasonal forecasts of hurricanes — you know, we’re not talking about the daily weather forecast here, because that differs a little bit from climate considerations, which are part of these long-term models and the death knell for the planet and so forth. But when you’re talking about seasonal hurricane forecasts, you’re getting a little closer to what they’re trying to do with global warming forecasts. And if they’re this wrong, and if they have no clue, and they don’t, they really have no clue, if they can’t tell us in March how many hurricanes we’re going to have between June 1st and November 30th, in a single year, then the question must be asked, since they believe hurricanes are part of the global warming aspect of carbon emissions and greenhouse gases, ‘Then why in the world are we to accept any prediction they make for 50 years out, 30 years out, or ten years out, particularly when those forecasts involve manmade activities?’
I saw this headline over the weekend, and I literally could not believe it. It is a story from the UK Telegraph, and the headline: ”Mankind ‘Shortening the universe’s life’.” Mankind is shortening the life everything! The universe is such, my friends, that the human brain cannot conceive it. Its size, its scope, we just can’t. Listen to this. ‘Forget about the threat that mankind poses to the Earth: Our activities may be shortening the life of the universe too. The startling claim is made by a pair of American cosmologists investigating the consequences for the cosmos of quantum theory, the most successful theory we have. Over the past few years, cosmologists have taken this powerful theory of what happens at the level of subatomic particles and tried to extend it to understand the universe, since it began in the subatomic realm during the Big Bang,’ they think. ‘But there is an odd feature of the theory that philosophers and scientists still argue about. In a nutshell, the theory suggests that we change things simply by looking at them and theorists have puzzled over the implications for years.
‘They often illustrate their concerns about what the theory means in this respect with mind-boggling experiments, notably Schrodinger’s cat in which, thanks to a fancy experimental set up, the moggy is both alive and dead until someone decides to look, when it either carries on living, or dies. That is, by one interpretation (by another, the universe splits into two, one with a live cat and one with a dead one.) New Scientist reports a worrying new variant as the cosmologists claim that astronomers may have provided evidence that the universe may ultimately decay by observing dark energy, a mysterious anti gravity force which is thought to be speeding up the expansion of the cosmos. The damaging allegations are made by Profs Lawrence Krauss of Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, and James Dent of Vanderbilt University, Nashville, who suggest that by making this observation in 1998 we may have determined that the cosmos is in a state when it was more likely to end. ‘Incredible as it seems, our detection of the dark energy may provide evidence that the universe will ultimately decay,’ says Prof Krauss.’
Now, folks, I’m going to admit here without any shame that I do not understand quantum theory. I tried to read Stephen Hawking’s book, I did read Stephen Hawking’s book, and at some point I got lost. Quantum theory is for minds far greater than mine. And yet, my mind ain’t bad. It’s a pretty good mind, most people would like to have it. The idea that we have observed dark energy, starting in 1998, means that we, by looking at it, are shortening the life span of the universe. I’m sorry, this just doesn’t compute. It’s like I’m looking at Snerdley right now. Does this mean I have shortened his life, by noticing him? Oops, Snerdley just died. He just keeled over and died. Look, these guys may have a plausible scientific explanation for this. My problem with this is that we are so insignificant. We couldn’t cause global warming; we couldn’t cause global cooling; we can’t do diddly-squat. We’re just inhabitants here.
We happen to be the smartest and most advanced inhabitants of this planet, but the idea that we, by looking at it, can destroy or shorten the universe’s life is just — when are we going to stop beating up on ourselves? God creates the universe, we can see it every night out back when there are no clouds, we can see the stars and see the moon. We’re not supposed to look at it? We discovered dark energy and that’s the end of the universe? It’s just not possible that we have the slightest idea how long it’s going to last or where it came from, how it started. All we have are theories that we cannot prove. And now put ourselves in this equation in a way that we’re going to damage it by looking at it, I’m sorry. It just doesn’t compute. There may be something to it scientifically that I’m unable to understand, but the notion that humanity has an impact on the life of the universe is just offensive to me. I’m getting sick and tired of all of this bashing of humanity as the central problem of the universe now, not just the planet Earth.
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RUSH: We’ve still got some phone calls coming up on this quantum theory, theory about looking at the universe shortening its lifespan. I knew that would happen because I know the smartest people in this country listen to this program. You want a climatologist? We got one. You want a physicist? You want a masters or doctoral candidate in physics? We got ’em. But first, one final story in the Global Warming Stack, and it dovetails with what I found wrong and offensive about the previous story that we, by looking at it, are destroying the universe. Also over the weekend the UK Daily Mail had a story, and it is long, about all the women who refuse to have babies in order to reduce their carbon footprint. ‘Had Toni Vernelli gone ahead with her pregnancy ten years ago, she would know at first hand what it is like to cradle her own baby, to have a pair of innocent eyes gazing up at her with unconditional love,’ while throwing up on her, ‘to feel a little hand slipping into hers — and a voice calling her Mummy. But the very thought makes her shudder with horror. Because when Toni terminated her pregnancy, she did so in the firm belief she was helping to save the planet. Incredibly, so determined was she that the terrible ‘mistake’ of pregnancy should never happen again, that she begged the doctor who performed the abortion to sterilise her at the same time.
‘He refused, but Toni — who works for an environmental charity — ‘relentlessly hunted down a doctor who would perform the irreversible surgery. Finally, eight years ago, Toni got her way. At the age of 27 this young woman at the height of her reproductive years was sterilised to ‘protect the planet’. Incredibly, instead of mourning the loss of a family that never was, her boyfriend (now husband) presented her with a congratulations card,’ after she sterilized herself. ‘While some might think it strange to celebrate the reversal of nature and denial of motherhood, Toni relishes her decision with an almost religious zeal. ‘Having children is selfish. It’s all about maintaining your genetic line at the expense of the planet,’ says Toni, 35. ‘Every person who is born uses more food, more water, more land, more fossil fuels, more trees and produces more rubbish, more pollution, more greenhouse gases, and adds to the problem of over-population.’ While most parents view their children as the ultimate miracle of nature, Toni seems to see them as a sinister threat to the future,’ and the planet. ‘It’s an extreme stance which one might imagine is born from an unhappy childhood or an upbringing among parents who share similar, strong beliefs. But nothing in Toni’s safe, middle- class upbringing gave any clues as to the views which would shape her adult life.
‘The eldest of three daughters, she enjoyed a loving, close-knit family life,’ but she was grabbed hold of by the environmentalist wacko movement. As I printed this out — this is a four-page story with the stories of a number of women who have gone out and had themselves sterilized so as to stop global warming — once again, who is polluting their minds with this stuff? It’s the militant left, the environmentalist wackos who have made these poor women think that humanity is the cause of all this! What have I always told you? ‘Everybody wants to matter. Everybody wants to make a difference. Everybody wants to have meaning in their lives.’ How empty and meaningless must you think your life is to go to this extent, to ‘save’ a planet that is not in peril, that is not threatened. This is evidence of this being a religion. My friends, but in every, every dark cloud there is a speck of sunshine and even in this there is happiness, because American and British liberals are literally wiping themselves out. They are aborting themselves out of electoral majorities faster than we could figure out policies to cream ’em at the ballot box, and they love doing it! They’re committing their own political genocide here and they’re happy about it. It gives their lives meaning. All we gotta do is sit back and watch ’em destroy.
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RUSH: Woodland Park, Colorado, Bill, welcome to the EIB Network. Hello.
CALLER: Thank you, Rush, honor to talk to you.
RUSH: Same here, sir.
CALLER: I thought maybe I could clarify a little bit what’s meant by disturbing systems when you observe them and why that probably is nonsensical when applied to the universe. The way we look at things, the way we observe anything is by throwing stuff at it. So like we throw light, we throw photons and they bounce off of things and we observe those, okay, and that normally is just insignificant, if you’re talking about a house and you’re throwing some photons off of it, it doesn’t disturb the house, but when you get down to a very, very, very small level, you’re talking about atoms and electrons, then the photons you’re throwing at it or maybe other electrons you’re throwing at it in order to find out what’s happening, disturb the system, they disturb it so that you really don’t have a great idea of what the system is doing because you’re disturbing it. So you apply this to dark matter in the universe —
RUSH: Would you explain for all of us lay people — you have a master’s in physics it says here.
CALLER: Right.
RUSH: Would you explain in lay terms dark matter.
CALLER: Pretty simple. It’s just matter that is unseen, that is not emitting any radiation that we can detect, and so it’s dark in the sense that it’s not emitting any light, and so the way we find out about dark matter in the universe is by its effects on other things, and the mass that it has by virtue of being there, we can’t actually see it.
RUSH: Yeah, we can’t see it, but we know it’s there?
CALLER: Right.
RUSH: Sort of like Bill knows Hillary’s there even when she’s not?
CALLER: (laughing) I don’t think it’s quite the same.
RUSH: As a lay person here, I’m just trying to understand this in my world.
CALLER: (laughing) But I don’t think you’d ever apply dark matter to Hillary.
RUSH: Ooooh.
CALLER: Well, in some sense, maybe, in some sense, maybe.
RUSH: (laughing) Okay, so dark matter is out there, and it’s scientifically established that it’s there, we know it.
CALLER: Sure.
RUSH: It’s not a theory, it’s there?
CALLER: Well, it’s all a theory. I mean, all that we do in science is a theory. And it’s okay — you know, it’s a good theory.
RUSH: Yeah, but you test it, you come up with your hypothesis, you test it and do all these other things to try to get close to it.
CALLER: Right.
RUSH: All right, so dark matter, we throw things at it like what?
CALLER: Well, I haven’t read the article, so I’m not exactly sure what they’re talking about, if they’re talking about disturbing it, then okay, basically they’re making observations of what the dark matter has done to other things. Without reading the article, I don’t know exactly what their observations were.
RUSH: Well, it’s a long article, and it gets pretty technical the longer it goes, but let me —
CALLER: It almost sounds to me like these guys are being whimsical, and, you know, scientists do have a sense of humor, believe it or not. And it’s almost like, well, this is kind of a fun little diversion, just like you mentioned Schrödinger’s cat, it’s a fun little thought experiment, but in terms of, you know, is anybody actually going to try this? No. It’s just kind of a fun thing to think about, and I think that might be what’s behind what they’re doing.
RUSH: Maybe so, but I look at news in a way that is different than you might look at this. You’d look at this from a scientific standpoint. I look at the headline, I think of the British people, we had a story about how women are sterilizing themselves so they won’t destroy the planet. Now, who’s putting that poison into their minds, British and the American left, the worldwide left, that humanity is destroying the planet? This story was not in the same paper, but it occurred in the same day or within a couple days in Great Britain. And the headline: ‘Mankind ‘Shortening the Universe’s Life.” So people are going to see this, and they’re really going to think we’re evil, our natural existence is evil and destructive.
CALLER: Oh, I have no doubt that that’s the way a lot of people are taking it, that might be very well — you know, why the article is even in the paper, you know, I’m right with you on all that, in terms of — I mean people can be just really ridiculous.
RUSH: Well, I’ll tell you what, I’m going to post this. We’re going to link to it at RushLimbaugh.com later this afternoon when we update the site to reflect the contents of today’s show, and it will be there. It’s written by a guy named Roger Highfield, who is the science editor of the UK Telegraph.
CALLER: That might be your problem right there.
RUSH: I know. You got a reporter involved.
CALLER: Exactly.
RUSH: But let me just read two paragraphs to you. I don’t want to get too technical, but the damaging allegations of looking at dark matter and shortening the universe are made by these two professors, and they said, ‘Incredible as it seems, our detection of the dark energy may provide evidence that the universe will ultimately decay. The team came to this depressing conclusion by calculating how the energy state of our universe — a kind of summation of all its particles and all their energies — has evolved since the Big Bang of creation 13.7 billion years ago. Some mathematical theories suggest that, in the very beginning, there was a void that possessed energy but was devoid of substance. Then the void changed, converting energy into the hot matter of the Big Bang. But the team suggests that the void did not convert as much energy to matter as it could, retaining some, in the form of what we now call dark energy, which now accelerates the expansion of the cosmos. Like the decay of a radioactive atom, such shifts in energy state happen at random and it is possible that this could trigger a new Big Bang.’
CALLER: (laughting) You know, let me explain my perspective on a lot of this, and that is, I write books for teachers to help them understand basic science. And one of the things I —
RUSH: It’s not working, by the way.
CALLER: What? (laughing.)
RUSH: I hate to interrupt you —
CALLER: Give me some time. But, you know, I always say that all of science is made up. And we’ve gotta realize that, you know, the whole theory of the Big Bang, all of this, especially in cosmology, if you’re off by a factor of ten or a hundred or a thousand, that’s good enough for them because there’s so many variables that come into play, it’s so difficult to get this information, and that applies to, you know, like you were talking earlier about the climate models. And the hundreds and hundreds of variables that go into these things, and it’s so easy to tweak it one another or another, and to just extract —
RUSH: Right. And we don’t even put all the factors in those models because we don’t know what all the factors are.
CALLER: Exactly, exactly.
RUSH: And yet the hubris and the arrogance, the vanity of humanity, leading us to such conclusions, destructive, evil conclusions about ourselves, this self-hatred, this self-loathing that so many people seem to have for the human race in general angers me. It does. So far it’s not hurting conservatives because the only people damaging themselves and aborting themselves and so forth are liberals. As I say, there’s a ray of sunshine in every dark cloud, every dark day. Still, this stuff is just getting out of hand. These people are getting wackier and wackier and wackier, and yet these theories are never reacted to in the proper way. This is patently absurd. I’m starting to sound like a broken record on this. I need to run here, Bill. I’m glad you called. Thanks much.
This is Joel in St. Louis. You’re next on the EIB Network, sir. Hello.
CALLER: Howdy, sir. I believe your mind is just fine for the realm of cosmology. It’s just that you are a radio specialist and have not the time.
RUSH: (laughter) Thank you, sir. I appreciate that.
CALLER: I was going to make a similar point to what the previous caller made, except I don’t believe this is necessarily best sold as the cosmology itself. I think this is — I’m positive, actually — that this is a philosophy problem created a long time by a gentleman named Immanuel Kant and another guy named Hegel. This idea that our observation influences the universe, it is unproven and had these gentlemen been in the science circles let’s say 200 years ago we would not have electricity. They wouldn’t know objectivity if —
RUSH: That is an excellent point. You know what this reminds me of, I don’t know if you were listening the day this happened, but there was a story that we had, some scientists suggested that what we needed to do was shred up a bunch of tires into really tiny granules and have just tons and tons of the stuff dropped into a particular quadrant of a major hurricane, and this would cause some sort of reaction in there, where it would steer the hurricane away from us and steer it to them. And of course then they wanted to go out and do studies on this. My official climatologist sent me a note, said this is impossible because, A, you don’t know if it’s going to work, and B, without having dropped the granules you do not know what the hurricane would have done in the first place. If you take action to try to change the direction of a hurricane, and it changes, you still don’t know if what you did made the change or not, and this is sort of what this sounds like to me in a different way.
CALLER: Absolutely.
RUSH: When we observe something, it changes, but how do we know because we’re looking at it, how do we know what happens if we don’t look at it?
CALLER: Well, that’s the question that’s been lost. The study of epistemology, which is asking a question, how do we know what we claim to know, is a science that hasn’t been taught for many, many years. I felt robbed of it after I left college and done some reading of Ayn Rand after I’d done my term in —
RUSH: Oh, yeah, the study of objectivism.
CALLER: I disagree with her on a few things but objectivity is necessary. It’s Aristotle, and then reiterated by Jesus, in whom I firmly believe. But it’s been lost. Objectivity is — is —
RUSH: Wait a minute. How rare are you? I know you’re a cosmology student. How rare are you as a cosmology student who believes in Jesus?
CALLER: (laughing) Pretty rare.
RUSH: I was going to say.
CALLER: The factor is this. I’ve done significant reading on cosmology. My favorite thing is Dr. Francis Collins, which is kind of for the layperson, but I’m primarily a student of political philosophy.
RUSH: Oh, I see. Okay. So you just have an adjunct interest in the cosmology stuff.
CALLER: Yeah, it comes into play when I —
RUSH: All right, let me ask you another question, you’re a scientist, you’re a budding scientist, Einstein’s theory of relativity, among many things, it says that the faster you travel, the slower time goes for you. You know that, right?
CALLER: Yes, sir. I’ve heard that.
RUSH: That’s a theory. Okay, so I happen to travel by jet quite a bit. I know I don’t approach the speed of light, and that’s what you have to do, once you get to the speed of light, the theory of relativity says time stops for you, but I don’t get that fast, but since I travel by jet so much, am I aging more slowly than people who only travel by car? Using Einstein’s theory.
CALLER: If you want an expert opinion from somebody that studies in my field, I’d have to say, who cares? It’s not going to be more than a millisecond.
RUSH: I do! I do!
CALLER: It’s not going to not age you. Because of the theory of relativity and the amount of speed you travel, you’ve got maybe .00 hundredths of a second missing from your life.
RUSH: I’ll take ’em. I’ll take ’em. Every one hundredth of a second counts.
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RUSH: One more little tidbit from the Global Warming Stack, ladies and gentlemen. San Francisco is seriously considering banning fireplaces because of the pollution emitted from your
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