All the way back in 2014, we wrote about how “we would normally ignore the low-grade blogs like NoTricksZone,” and since then we’ve only occasionally bothered to point out the blog’s repeated misrepresentations of studies, utter stupidity, and bizarre conspiracy theories.
Well, it’s that time again, as Kenneth Richard has a post that is so bad it’s [cue x-treme ‘90s ad guitar riff] out of this world!
Literally.
According to the headline, “Scientists have determined a 5°C warmer Earth ‘would provide more habitable conditions.” What a claim! Does this mean we should just let warming go unchecked? Who are the scientists making such a determination, anyway? Are they even climate experts? Of course not!
Or, well, actually, yes, they are.
It’s just not Earth’s climate they’re focused on. Because the paper in question is titled “In search for a planet better than Earth: top contenders for a superhabitable world.” It’s about finding alien planets that are not just capable of sustaining life, like Earth, but actually even more so.
So because the equatorial rainforests have more biodiversity than the cold arctic, and temperatures in those tropical rainforests are about 5°C warmer than Earth’s average, the scientists considered a climate on an alien planet that’s 5°C warmer than Earth’s to be a valuable quality.
But here’s the thing. We’re not building civilization from scratch here on this planet. We’ve already done that, and we did it in a way that’s finely balanced, based on the climate we have. (Or had.)
So while warmer temperatures might mean more grass growing in the Arctic, as Kenneth implies — and that might be great for the mammoths and wild horses that once grazed there —it’s not going to be good for the thousands of miles of oil pipelines criss-crossing Alaska. They were built on the assumption that the permafrost would remain permanently frozen, and warming means destabilizing their very foundations. (Not to mention the secret ‘60s military sites in the Arctic ice, converted to toxic and radioactive waste dumps, and now thawing out.)
Coastlines are another example. Thousands of miles of roads, bridges, docks, houses, business, boardwalks and other infrastructure is built along the ocean. If it were all built to float, then sure, the sea level rise brought by 5°C of warming would be no problem! But since every coastal community, from Maui to Miami to Manhattan and on around the world, was built to exist above the water not beneath it, those places aren’t going to be habitable under that much warming, much less “super habitable.”
But here’s a compromise: Let’s send Kenneth Richard to live on one of those super-habitable planets, and he can tell us how ideal it is.
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