Plant A Tree — How Scientists Got It So Wrong November 15, 2019December 8, 2019 But first: Mark Jansen: “I’m in Turin for a conference, and tonight the hotel bar TVs were tuned not to soccer or sports highlights but to the US congressional impeachment hearings. I pray the US will once again exemplify the ‘better angels of our nature,’ as our first Republican president described. The world is watching.” → Yes. Which wolf will we feed? And second: Have you met Mondaire Jones? I find his life story more appealing than Trump’s or Wilbur Ross’s or Paul Manafort’s or Roy Cohn’s. Or Lindsey Graham’s or Jim Jordan’s or Daryl Issa’s or Trey Gowdy’s or Devon Nunez’s or Kellyanne Conway’s. They seem to be feeding the wrong wolf. And now: Plant a tree. “By looking at inspired local lessons learned around the world, we [see] how forests can fight climate change.” One of many happy-gene “reasons to be cheerful.” Two of my friends agree with Trump that this whole climate hysteria is nonsense. They might both be drawn to a validating headline like this one: How Scientists Got Climate Change So Wrong. I hope so. Because if they click, they’ll see that scientists have grossly UNDER-estimated the crisis. One of my Trumpist friends writes: As you know, I am a skeptic of the global warming hysteria, and believe that any and all human activity has at most an infinitesimal impact on the climate, which is primarily and ultimately dependent upon how much solar energy reaches the Earth. For five decades I have been a semi-student of solar cycles, after my old boss at the economics department at Citibank and I studied the weak solar cycle of the early 1970s that caused widespread crop failures in the Northern Hemisphere and was largely responsible (with the Arab oil embargoes) for the great inflation of the 1970s. I have long thought the general warming trend of the last several decades was a transitory cyclical condition, and that we are more likely to be facing one or more 11-year very weak and erratic solar cycles, which will produce global cooling, perhaps severely. This may now be starting, and so I suspect we are much more likely to see cooler, maybe much cooler, temperatures for perhaps several decades to come. I replied: We are dumping 40 billion tons of CO2 into the atmosphere each year, plus methane. That accumulates, regardless of 11-year solar cycles. You have concluded that we could put TRILLIONS of tons of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere with no effect. You believe these 11,000 scientists haven’t thought about it as clearly as you; and are SO certain of your position, SO certain there’s no appreciable chance the scientists are right, you would put the lives of all future generations at risk. Really? He replied (in effect): “Yep.” Have a great weekend.