Busy though she may be, you can always count on Aunt Agatha: We both like scientific reality, and this is a rather substantial piece of it Climate http://earthintime.com/earthintime.html

See also Global Warming is Scam, Not Science
Global Warming Insanity.com
The Fallacy of "Climate Change" -- Signs of the Times News
The Spectator: The Great Global Warming Scam

Now, will all the great opinionated stupids of the world please shut up. It was an inane idea to begin with, and it is now over, ended, scuttled, moribund, dead, trashed, bitten the dust, abbrogated, eaten away, deliquescent, blotted out, eviscerated, invalidated, eradicated, erroded, exhausted, exterminated, quashed, squashed, undermined, extinquished, vitiated, unstrung, micturated upon, excrementalized, cremated and buried by virtue of its odor of mendacity.

Let it go, and get a brain and a life.

My Darlings,

Thank you for your lovely e-mail. I certainly understand your distress over this "global warming" business, and that it is difficult to know what to believe. The phrase has become a political football with the teams squaring off for an intense dispute, but the game is not likely to be anything worthy of attention since both teams seem to be composed not only of ignoramuses, but genuine idiots and paid liars. Meanwhile, however, the process of reality continues apace independently of such nonsense.

When you have lived as long as I have, you learn to believe very little, especially if it is said or written; that just means some liar has become very serious about his profession. So, I hope you will forgive me for not having some serious medical event over this. Auntie Agatha has just never been very good with techniques to masturbate other people's emotions. I hope you will also forgive me for mentioning my age now and again since it has much to do with my perspective on things.

Stasis is a good thing for children to experience, and it is good to provide such stability for them; but, it's not such a good thing for adults to expect, mostly because they will be bitterly disappointed in its nonexistence. Disappointment is something best avoided when at all possible. It's so - well - disappointing. You know what I mean. It is so easy to set yourself up for disappointment by trying so hard to believe that the world is something other than it is; but that seems to be a very characteristic people disease. Things change, even really big things, when you don't notice that they do. I learned that from your uncle Harry. He was the geophysicist; I'm sure you remember him - sort of roundish, he was. [Tee hee]

Anyhow, he reminded me about how things have changed climatically over the past 12,000 years, when there were not so many people around, and before that and even over the past few hundred years. Think of the Winter solstice, and how people prayed and did magical things that made the cold go away and the warmth of Summer return. I'm sure they thought the prayers and ceremonies did the trick, but we know better now. Don't we? It was just part of a cycle, even if a long, and surely important one for the time.

It took a long time to figure out the 11 year sunspot cycle, and now I hear that things are really very much more complicated, and that there are other longer cycles. This is not one of the forgotten pieces of Babylonian astronomy. Your auntie Agatha is getting too old to fight this kaka.

Not too long ago, some people were very scared that the hook of Massachusetts was eroding because of something they did. Then old maps and measurements showed that the hook actually moves north and south periodically in some little geophysical cycle. I do recall that this was written up in an article in Scientific American, at a time when it was actually worth reading. Needless to say, certain people were greatly relieved not to be at fault.

I think people generally have a greatly exaggerated sense of their own importance in the scheme of things. Your auntie Agatha may think you are dear and important, and you are my sweeties, but really, the rest of the world, and the rest of the universe doesn't give a rodent's rectum about any of us. Existential Angst is hardly worth the effort, however much has been written about it; the writing about it is more anxiety producing than the facts themselves.

The earth has been around far longer than we have, and it has its own way of being, and its own destiny that hasn't have much to do with us. We move in its large circles on these vast cycles and think they are straight lines, leading off to some infinite and therefore scary place, like some people who forgot that the earth is not flat. Sometimes, we forget things that are obvious and important, and then become all bothered about other things that don't exist.

Do you know about tectonic plate movement? About the fact that the earth's magnetic field (however that really comes about) has flipped and reversed itself several times? That means that our magneto model of where the Earth's magnetic field comes from is nonsense. We have oil in the earth older than the Cretaceous - meaning that the stories we've been told about where oil comes from is also nonsense. It's amazing how much nonsense we know. Uncle Harry loved telling me about all this.

I've always rather liked the visions of the Sahara 12,000 years ago being lush, tropical and filled with water and vegetation. It is not all that long ago you know. The wheel turns, does it not?

How about the world's first great air pollution? That was about 2.2 billion years ago when cyanobacteria polluted the earth's atmosphere with oxygen! Harry really liked talking about that one. Things really do change my dears; it's what they do, and we should get used to it and stop all the whining and blaming - and above all blaming ourselves. We're just not that powerful or important.

If you really must blame someone, blame ferrets, cows and rats for farting, volcanoes for erupting. The rotting of cockroach carcases causes a considerable release of methane into the atmosphere; it's one of the problems with having a planet with an essentially carbon based ecosystem. It is all affected by the things in the space through which it moves.

The earth is very complicated place, my dears, and if you think these recta who are paid to blather nonsense about what is and will be have the slightest understanding of how it all goes together you would be making a grave mistake. Oh yes, they make models and pretend the models have something to do with reality, but they don't. They don't and can't know the whole system, and so have no idea at all what is important and what is not. You would do much better consulting a warlock who doesn't just say what those who pay him expect him to say.

You see, my darlings, we really are rather stupid creatures when it comes down to it. The tricky secret is admitting that in order to transcend it; then we begin to find out how we act, and then make up rationalizations for our actions, and why we call things by words that mean nothing. If we are made in the image and likeness of god, god is not only in deep doodoo, but is clueless as to the fact. We won't even discuss his current selfproclaimed prophets, better spelled profits.

I don't even hate to disillusion you by saying that none of it is science in any sense of the word, but does contribute something to a certain kind of global warming with its entropic hot air. I know they have to call it something, but who would buy it, much less spell it, if they called is pseudophenomenological taurine excrement? Hmmm - well - perhaps a few classically trained farmers would be interested.

Blaming, in this kind of case, is really rather stupid and emotionally based - looking for simplistic answers to ill posed questions that only exist within childish models, and then demanding that those answers exist and actually mean something. Auntie says "Poo!" to all such silliness. That, of course, is not to excuse murderous corporations throwing terrible poisons into the water we drink; auntie says make all those brilliant CEOs, board members and supporting bankers and politicians, and all their families drink it, if it's so wonderful. But, auntie digresses, again; she does that.

Maybe, when I have more time, we can talk about psychological engineering and the manufacturing of political truth. Some other time, Auntie is getting a headache just thinking about that, and needs her wits for some work today.

Even though all the little ecopunditos like to talk about the heat of warming, it's really all about entropy. If you are bound and determined to be guilty, please then just shove corks up your sweet little asses; death by explosion will at least be dramatic and quick - but, alas, also be even a greater increase of entropy.

Some battles are not only not winnable, but reasonably stupid to have been instigated in the first place. That actually covers most battles, and all war - that is, of course, unless you happen to be a big bank, and think only in short terms. If the earth thinks, it is not in short terms.

Sweeties, we are living on tail end of an extremely long ice age, so you might just expect a little natural overall warming; but, really there's evidence or reason to expect that either. With all the chicken little disaster warnings, and all this reported melting of everything in sight, you would think the overall ocean levels would have risen a few feet? In fact, New York City, Venice and Amsterdam are doing quite well and do not seem to be in danger of inundation. This is not to say that with a suitable application of governmental technology that they will not be in danger of being quite throughly swamped, but that's a different matter altogether.

Well, I have taken up enough your time, and mail has just brought in a few texts in Sumerian and First dynasty Egyptian for me to reconcile. Uncle Albert is off on his daily constitutional, his faithful cat, Spot trotting along with him.

The first time I met him (Albert, not Spot), I had wandered into the old math building with all its old tiled walls. The entire building was resonating from his perfect, sweet whistling.

I just sat until he had finished the entire Beethoven violin concerto. When he started Mendelssohn concerto, I tracked him down, found him and waited again until he was finished. I don't think I ever told you about that. We have not been apart since. I think he's now working on the Boccherini cello concerto; that should be interesting. As for the mathematics he's working on, I would not dream of asking; the answer would, I am sure, give me several days of headaches.

So, chill out, dears! When you see the water level rising to invade your beach house, move! The earth is not likely to make exceptions, just for you. If you get knocked about a bit, a little mugwort should help fix you up. Otherwise, do not lose too much sleep over manipulative claptrap. But, do resist the temptation to go down to the beach to watch the tsunami come in; being naked or not, is not the issue.

As always,

	Your loving Aunt Agatha

   (PS: picture and hear aunt Agatha as Dianne Wiest in "Practical
	Magic (1998): a mere cohesive conceit of extended persona.)

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