The Grand Unified Frog Theorem

By Number Six

Friday, September 23, 2005 at 04:23 PM

One of the neater things one of our esteemed teachers taught us those long moons ago? Beware of taking the data and making the incorrect conclusions based on such.

To illustrate his point, he told us a joke entitled The Grand Unified Frog Theorem. I'll recap and keep it to the point:

Researcher is conducting a study of sorts with a live frog. He commands the frog to jump; frog jumps. Distance is measured. Researcher takes scalpel and removes a leg, again, commanding frog to jump. Frog moves, but distance is now shorter.

As one might can guess, the researcher eventually does away with the final leg, and commands frog to jump. Frog does not comply.

"A frog without legs is obviously deaf."

Some howled, the rest of us snickered, but the point was made: Before you "jump" to a conclusion, use the scalpel of testing, more testing, review and analysis to figure out what's really going on. Then, of course, the real truth emerges: Frog without legs is either dead or fucking crippled, duh!

Nothing could be more along these lines than the rantings, oh, yes, once again of the neo-con science crowd, or, as I refer to them, The School Of Ignoring Reality For Political And Religious Nonsense. Yeah, those clowns.

Studying the wrath, as we all have recently, of hurricanes Katrina and Rita, they look at the data and cough up......well....

"There is a cause to this, of course, it's due to the effect of a cyclical deal. We're just in a portion of the wave where there are more hurricanes."

I'll buy that for a dollar, I sez to myself, but, as always, they tend to think the frog is deaf, not dead.

"Scuse'm moi?", I say, hand up. "We're not fucking talking about hurricanic frequency, shit for craniums, we're talking about hurricanic intensities."

See, there is a difference between the number of hurricanes emitted per annum, and the horsepower of those that are generated.

MmmHmm. See, most of us who understand meteorology know all about the climate "cyclic" timing curves; they are most real and have existed for eons so far. Yes, we do agree, some years, even decades go by, nope, no 'canes headed this way. Then, we hit those "peaks" where, oh, golly gosh, we can't take a shit without a hurricane roaring right at us.

For example? Texas around 1960-1965. Hurricanes almost every year. Later on? Hurricanes elsewhere. The cycle seems to have repeated, obviously.

But, what the neo-kooks, twisting fact to conform to their pet theorem, which of course, allows for runaway CO2, CO, and whatever else...in order to perpetuate "the economy"...don't seem to get, well, is the other part of the data they don't yet understand: Greenhouse gases are turning the existing storms, regardless of when and where they come from, regardless of the course heading....into motherfuckers from hell.

Yes. Hurricanes of the past were, by comparison to Hugo, Andrew, Katrina, Rita...rather tame, rarely busting the Cat 4 mark, if ever. Now, with global warming just warming up, we can and are currently seeing Cat 4,5, and just the other day, a brief 6.

In other words, science fans, the cyclic stuff is nice, but does little to point we liberals and tree-huggers away from a known scientific fact: The hotter the water under a hurricane, the more said storm acts like it was made by Pratt & Whitney. Oh, yes, if the current temp rise in ocean waters keeps going, I will bet anyone we will, within our lifetime, seen a phenomenal 200-knot storm appear.

200 knots. That's the speed a jet cruises below 10,000 feet on final approach. Structures made currently can't take that much wind, and we're moaning over the 100-150 stuff so far?

The mathematics isn't that hard to deal with, but to keep us from hauling out the slide rules, here it is simply put:

A 1 degree Celsius increase in water doesn't sound like much, until you realize that's spread out over several square thousand miles. That's like tossing a Lucky Strike into pine straw, spread over 1000 acres. You guess the final result.

Note Katrina and her course: A pretty bad storm while in the Atlantic, but notice that once she made it into the gulf, which has a higher water temp, she went from "pretty bad storm" to "motherfucker" storm. The trigger? The gulf water, of course, being far hotter than it has ever been in recorded history.

Ah, I see a hand up. Yes?

"Doctor Six, if that's true, then why do the neo-assholes keep insisting there's no such thing as global warming, sir?"

That's called Head Up Your Ass Syndrome, often, too, called Dittoheaditus or Republicanus Retardus.

See, they think that if, we do realize the horrid truth, well, we'll have to start enforcing environmental laws for real, to make those users of fossil fuels install filtration systems, and of course, make them start looking damned hard at alternative sources of energy that do not produce greenhouse gases.

Such, of course, would pour piss over the cornflakes of, gee, those industries in Texas, for example, that get away with environmental damage as hasn't been seen since the early days of the Industrial Revolution. Under Chimp, yes, laws were laxed and loosened, allowing industries to take a huge laxative shit into the water, the air and the land with pollutants, greenhouse gases and anything else they can think of.

And then, they'd whine like four-year-olds: "You'll ruin the economy!"

To which I always reply with the old Klingon proverb: "Only a madman fights in a burning house."

Meaning? What good is a killer economy going to do anyone....with hurricanes with 200-knot winds storming the shorelines? With air nobody can breathe without asthma attacks increasing in frequency? Or how about those weird-looking frogs we've found lately...suffering genetic horrors? Are we next, I dare? Are we?

It's a shell game, I tell you. It's using only a part of the whole stack of facts before us, ignoring hard a very critical piece of data, in order to keep praying to Jaysus, voting Republican, driving vehicles the size of 747's, and otherwise pretending life is good.

The truth, obviously, is being ignored. Unless greenhouse emissions are cut and cut hard, we can fully expect far, far worse to come. Even if the "cycle" does fade and soon, the resulting storms that do come are going to resemble shit from the worst science-fiction ever assembled.

And the fact is dirt simple: Hotter water under a storm means more power. Cut the temp down, the existing storm doesn't spin as fast. To cut the temps, we must immediately cut greenhouse gas emissions by huge amounts.

Or, we can sit on our asses and await a storm that comes ashore in Florida, and destroys everything right up the coast to New York. By the time a 200-knot storm calmed enough to return to TS status, the devastation would be worse than nuclear exchange. Such a storm would bankrupt America, period, and that might be just one storm yet to come.

Just one storm.

Class dismissed.