A True Story From My Alarmist Days

During the 2002 drought in Colorado, the city of Longmont shut down most of the city soccer fields, in a vain effort to protect the grass.  I was coaching kid soccer at the time, and went to a city council meeting and asked them to open the fields because :

  1. There is nothing wrong with playing on dirt. Kids in much of the world play on dirt and go on to win the World Cup.
  2. Scientists say the drought is only going to get much worse, as global warming gets worse.

By autumn 2006, I was regularly coaching in freezing cold rain and snow, almost every weekend.

The city council did open the fields up after that meeting. Apparently my appeal was effective.

About Tony Heller

Just having fun
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42 Responses to A True Story From My Alarmist Days

  1. Bob Greene says:

    Practicing your own Gore effect?

  2. Hmmm, but better you got. Looked at the data you did. Hmmm.

  3. philjourdan says:

    Well, I once said that “No one needs to run more than one program at a time”. That was 25 years ago.

    We all make mistakes. Now we can laugh at them.

    • nielszoo says:

      I remember asking a friend (who made far more money than I did) what on earth he was going to do with 64k of memory that he couldn’t already do with 8k or 16k. He also owned a Shugart drive and five 8″ floppies, which were around 150 to 200k of storage each if I remember right (It was an odd number for binary.) We all thought he was wasting his money. Today you could take every one of our computers and every bit of storage me and my friends owned and it is a fraction of a sector today.

      • philjourdan says:

        When Client Server architecture was just starting out, the DBA where I worked came up with a plan that “only” required 16mb of memory for every PC. I told him he was crazy! To boost all those computers to that amount of memory would cost more than every item in IT!

        Of course that was when 1mb was considered a lot – even on Macs. 😉

  4. thegriss says:

    And I’ll bet that at the time , all the sewage was going elsewhere.

    Treat the darn stuff, water and fertilise the fields.

    Only need to keep people off them for a couple of days after watering, AND you have lovely green playing fields.

  5. I never believed in global warming. I knew the alarmists were wrong from day one, mostly based on the quality of the people who were doing the alarming. All the raving about Venus and tipping points, oceans boiling when the CO2 hits 600 ppm, it was pure idiocy. When Al Gore’s movie came out, I was disgusted.

    • squid2112 says:

      Like Tony, I too was somewhat of a “believer”, until I began to hear about “tipping points”. Nature doesn’t work through tipping points. Completely absurd to believe that our planet would not have met such “tipping point” already, after nearly 4 billion years.

      What really clinched though, was to learn about their hypothesis’ of the so-called “greenhouse effect” .. not one of their more than half a dozen version of the hypothesis is possible in this universe. The case was summarily closed…

  6. Edmonton Al says:

    As I have said: The validity of MSM statements or declarations is INVERSELY proportional to what they are declaring. eg: Global warming; we are past the tipping point. Thermageddon!
    Actually a cooling trend

  7. lance says:

    when my boys were growing up, they played in the spring time…i’m sure it was cold and rain/snow every game/practice!!

  8. gymnosperm says:

    Maybe we were all alarmists once? I was. Early nineties, temperatures going through the roof, CO2 going through the roof. I was seriously worried. It was like inflation in the early eighties. It was like, “Man, we really got to find a way to stop this shit.” Paul Volker took care of inflation, the hard way, probably the only way, but the warming took care of itself.

    It was like a bad dream and you wake up.

    My own journey to skepticism began in the early millennium when I was forced to defend the meme to some reactionary friends and came to realize after a few months of research that it was just a bad dream.

    The problem now is that most will not undertake the research effort and just cast about for some authority to trust. The logical choice is institutional science which has no incentive to wake up.

  9. Andy DC says:

    I had read about the 1930’s and examined the actual temperature data a long time ago. My gut feeling was always a bit skeptical, since I knew our summer temperatures during my own life were nowhere near those of the 30’s.

  10. darrylb says:

    In Minnesota we still have two weeks of high school football tournament play.
    My son in law’s team is still in it. He has always worn shorts at the games.
    He may for the first time (in over 20 years) change his tradition in that we are expecting wind chill below
    zero F. — and a high not much above zero.
    Of course its due to global warming yada yada yada

    and yeah, I thought there was warming, until my daughter, who has degrees in biology and environmental studies told me to prove it. Six years later I have not proven anything, but I have learned much, and much from this blog. Thank You!

    • philjourdan says:

      Your son-in-law reminds me of the Swiss Alp guides we had back in the 70s, We went on a skiing trip, but not to a resort. Instead if was a private chalet that we had to hike to (on skis). The guides would go out and “bathe” in the snow as there was no running water – almost nude of course (they wore shorts).

      Bet he is part of the polar bear club! 😉

  11. Sparks says:

    I was lucky.. My form teacher taught us about global warming in the 1980’s, he informed us that all the hype about heading into an ice age is the same as the hype about heading into a runaway global warming. This is a teacher I want every child to have.. and besides, that year we won our secondary school cup for soccer, even tho our team were the “underdogs”. Yep on presentation day we were called the underdogs. We kicked ass you mean! lol

  12. geran says:

    You have conquered “CAGW-phobia”, now you can move on to conquer “AGW-phobia”. Full recovery is as close as a good physics book.

  13. tabnumlock says:

    I’ve always been a denier. I happened to catch the one and only showing of this 1990 Brit documentary on the Discovery Channel before it was pulled.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C-x4YbXZtIA

    I still like it better than the more recent remake. For one thing, it points out that more CO2 is beneficial to plants.

  14. Pathway says:

    Never bought into the hype because I could see that the people saying we were all going to die were the same ones that railed against nuclear power. Secondly, having worked on geologic environs that are 2,920,000,000 years old I knew that mans influence on the environment is negligible.

  15. Baa Humbug says:

    Scientists say???????? haha haha haha haha
    It’s ok Steve, you were young and naive 12 years ago lol

  16. rah says:

    Never an alarmist. BS detector always goes off when the government starts hyping such things. Don’t believe fracking causes earthquakes either.
    And yes, I absolutely believe that Neil Armstrong was the first man to walk on the moon.
    And I think that those that believe that the attacks of 9/11 were in inside job rank right up there with those that claim it was the British that attacked Pearl Harbor to get the US into the war.

  17. gator69 says:

    As a climatology student I wrote a regrettable paper on desertification. Then I recalled my years of geology studies, regained my senses, and called BS the moment I heard about CAGW. Fool me once…

    • I just assumed that somewhere someone had done the “science”. It turned out that that assumption was entirely wrong. … or they had “done” as in “done over”, “beaten up and trampled on it”.

      • gator69 says:

        Most people have no clue that the IPCC was charged with the task of proving AGW, and only proving AGW. The IPCC is nothing more than a highly paid spokesmodel.

  18. The first time I really asked I was at the Scottish Parliamentary Renewable Energy Group and asked one of the people who’ve made a huge personal fortune from wind – it just occurred to me that despite repeated assertions, I had never seen any actual evidence.

    And even now, the calculated figure of “CO2 warming” has only been mentioned once to my knowledge, not even in a section of the IPCC report, but as a footnote as about 1.2C. Then Hermann Harde, who is an expert in this area, used the UP TO DATE data and worked out that the better data only suggested 0.6C, and strangely THIS ONE PIECE OF ACTUAL SCIENCE upon which this whole scam is supposedly based, is entirely missing from the IPCC reports.

    Let me restate that … there’s one piece of science that supposedly makes this whole scam credible which is the CO2 warming effect … but that one figure is entirely missing from almost all IPCC reports. And the reason is obvious … this one piece of science doesn’t actually support the scam!

  19. Chris Barron says:

    Did he move to the UK ?
    We’ve been having this horrible global warming cold wet weather for hundreds of years, so I guess our industrial revolution must have begun before everyone else’s 😉

  20. markstoval says:

    I see this is a thread of personal experiences so I will add a bit to it.

    I did not believe we were all that close to the end of the present interglacial period and that the “new ice age” scare was overblown. I did think that some thought about what to do whenever the temps started falling was warranted, but not the alarmist BS.

    Then came the “global warming” scam built on top of the James Hansen BS. It was not credible at all that a trace gas that has been at levels in the past that were much, much higher than at present would cause any warming. And if it did cause a bit of warming that would be a good thing. After investigating what they were saying I saw that I would have flunked them all if they had taken beginning physics in my class. Even worse, over the years we have seen that these clowns just use statistics to tell lies.

    I guess I was always a “denier”.

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