Ticky Tacky Nation

Little boxes on the hillside
Little boxes made of ticky tacky...

The post-WWII American dream of a house in the suburbs and two cars in the driveway included a bait-&-switch lay-away payment plan that a few really smart people have been screaming about for 50 years while greedy people only pshawed and plowed up more and more farmland and forests for more and more ticky tacky little boxes.

In fact, ticky tacky people (who listen to really greedy people) think that global warming doesn't sound like a bad thing at all: Wouldn't global warming make life easier for grannies living on fixed incomes in Northern states?

Like I said, ticky tacky people.

Which brings us to the "Climate Loonies"...

Sir John Lawton, chairman of the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution which advises the government, made what the Independent newspaper said was a thinly disguised attack on the stance of U.S. President George W. Bush's administration.

"The increased intensity of these kinds of extreme storms is very likely to be due to global warming," Lawton told the newspaper in an interview.

"If this makes the climate loonies in the States realise we've got a problem, some good will come out of a truly awful situation," said Lawton. LINK

Other smart people say...

Kerry Emanuel states that the potential hurricane destructiveness, a measure which combines strength, duration, and frequency of hurricanes, "is highly correlated with tropical sea surface temperature, reflecting well-documented climate signals, including multidecadal oscillations in the North Atlantic and North Pacific, and global warming."K. Emanuel further predicts "a substantial increase in hurricane-related losses in the twenty-first century."

Along similar lines, P.J. Webster et al. published an article in Science (309, 1844-1846) examining "changes in tropical cyclone number, duration, and intensity" over the last 35 years, a period where satellite data is available. The main finding is that while the number of cyclones "decreased in all basins except the North Atlantic during the past decade" there is a "large increase in the number and proportion of hurricanes reaching categories 4 and 5;" i.e., while the number of cyclones decreased overall, the number of very strong cyclones increased.

Forget trying to convince ticky tacky people that fossil fuel emissions contribute to global warming. They only understand what they see on TV or on their own ticky tacky street.

They watched The Hurricane Katrina Show. They now understand a little bit more about hurricanes.

They might even know now that warmer water makes hurricanes stronger.

Which means that they might be wondering about all that global warming stuff they ignored for so long.

Hey, it's a start!


PBU39
File this under: All made out of ticky tacky.