There are things in the future that we can predict. We know with certainty that fifty years from now the sun will rise in the morning and set in the evening, and we can even tell the exact minute for each day when that will happen. We know that if two balls of unequal weight are dropped from the Tower of Pisa they both will hit the ground in 3.3 seconds, and we have known this for 432, years ever since Galileo did that experiment. There are many things we know with reasonable certainty, baring a thermonuclear wipeout of mankind. What we will not know is what the weather will be tomorrow or what the global temperature will be in 30 years. Weather systems follow a non-linear chaos pattern. IT IS NOT PREDICTABLE! Will there be global warming or the opposite is not known, and the crystal ball and the future predicting computers are myths. At the moment, the globe is warming.
The warming trend started at the end of the “Little Ice Age” in 1850. Ironically the tauted cause of this warming, CO2 rise, did not start until 1890, a 40-year lag. Logic tells us that the cause is supposed to precede effect. By some magic, the warming started before the CO2 rise. Warming continued until the 1940s, which then took another pause even though CO2 paradoxically kept going up. In fact, there was “Global Cooling,” another black eye for CO2.
Warming then resumed along with continued CO2 rise. There was another difficult to explain the pause in the temperature rise from 1998 to 2012 when CO2 failed to perform as advertised. The climatologists had the explanation all precalculated on their fail-proof future predicting computers. It was the La Niña, who knew? This is one more time that CO2 has failed us. It has not been this cold on earth in the last 250 million years. There have been five major and 12 minor glaciations, of which a number of them have CO2 levels of 3000ppm and higher. Where was global warming when you needed it?
Correlation and causation are two different things. Just because B follows A does not mean A caused B. Besides, CO2 has been all over the place regardless of what global temperatures were. The bottom line is that AOC is not the “go-to person” to tell us what global temperatures will be in 8 years or 100 years. She does not know!
There is an increasing number of climate scientists who are not so sure anymore. All you need to do is look at Amazon’s increasing list of books being published, questioning the general wisdom and joining the “deniers” who point out that science needs more study and more time. Even one of the founders of Greenpeace has had second thoughts. Read his book, “Confessions of a Greenpeace Dropout.” Perhaps you won’t need that Tesla after all.
Another aspect of this is cost. As of today, one kWh (Kilowatt hour) costs $0.31. A Volt battery holds 16 kWh. It will get you 25 miles before the gasoline engine kicks in. That is 16 x $0.31= $4.96 divided by 25 miles = 0.1984. It costs you 20 cents to drive one mile in a Volt. Today’s average gasoline cost for regular is $3.19 per gallon. In a comparable car that gets 32 miles to the gallon, that would be 10 cents a mile. This does not even include the relative costs of an electric car vs. a standard gasoline car. A Volt costs $45,000 compared to a similar-sized gasoline-powered Honda at $20,000. Not only does it cost double for fuel and at least double for the car. I know that AOC had a lot of environmental training tending Bar in the Bronx, but are you willing to pay double for political correctness based on a theory that still has a lot of inconsistencies, is based on computer predictions of the future, and has nowhere near 97% agreement?
Think about this for a moment. CO2 is plant food that is making our earth greener, increasing agricultural yields of everything from corn and wheat to carrots, plus extending the growing season. Extreme cold causes 5,400,000 deaths on earth every year vs. 311,000 for heat. It is cold we need to fear more than warmth. We are in an interglacial period that has already lasted 11,500 years. The usual time for an interglacial period is 10,000 years. We may be at the brink of another glaciation, and all that CO2 is keeping us warm. “It is tough to make predictions, especially about the future.”– Yogi Berra