Yellowstone Is Going To Blow!

A lot of the environmental movement's lunacy comes from the motivation for preservation. The Earth is pretty, and we must keep things exactly as they are! If some landscape is changing, and the Earth becomes unpretty, either we're at fault, or we need to do something, anything, to stop it! Well, the Earth has always been changing, and it's the same arrogance we have to manipulate the environment to make huge cities, that makes us want to manipulate the environment to change it back. Otherwise, why would we ever seriously consider endeavors which bury carbon dioxide under the sea, or spur huge algae blooms with pipes or iron dumping to gobble up that weak greenhouse gas.

It's also this arrogance that fueled the huge fires in Yellowstone in 1988. Bad fire management policies left way too much fuel to burn, instead of letting natural fires from lightning strikes run their course. Now, we have evidence that the ancient supervolcano underneath Yellowstone, which is the geothermal source of all the pretty geysers, is moving the crust upward at about three inches a year. There's no danger of eruption, yet, but when people are going crazy about the sea level going up three inches in a century, I can only wonder what the response would be. Of course, we aren't responsible for the environmental change, but what do you think will happen if the land rise continues, and alters all the pretty landscape? Will there be all this nonsensical talk of diverting the magma with huge pipes? The environmentalists' history of histrionics don't rule it out.

And will there be any histrionics about another land rise? The glacier on Mont Blanc, which has featured prominently as one of the disappearing glaciers due to evil man and his bad breath, has been growing since 2003, and climate weirdos are trying to pin the growth on global warming. The claim is that the icepack is growing because of the higher temperatures causing more winds to keep the icepack in place. So is this good news, bad news, or just head scratching? As a scientifically inquisitive kind of a guy, I always vote for head scratching, because that means new science, which means weak theories get shoved off those glacier growing peaks. Perhaps global models do poor jobs at reconstructing local climate changes, not due to lack of specific variables, but because local climate feedbacks are actually forcings, not the other way around.