So, I wound up seeing the game yesterday. Eventually.

Initially, I was thinking it started earlier than it did. Because timezones suck. Someone at twitter.com mentioned that the game started at three, which I took to mean 15.00EST. Apparently, that was 15.00PST, so the game started around here at four, not one. Because there are twenty-three unique&special snowflake timezones too selfimportant to make sense and go with ZuluTime.

Of course, things started at one, insofar as the only chance of getting a table at the pub involved getting there around noon. So we wound up at more of a houseparty to see this thing.

About the game: it wasn't really my problem. I guess I was hoping Indiana would win, simply because I hate NewOrleans, know someone in Indiana, and have heard of Manning. It's all the criteria I have. Not that the symbolism of a guy whose name is a homonym of breeze winning for a city once trashed by Katrina and the Waves is lost on me.

But this isn't really about that. It's more about this:

Great game; lousy commercials
--MondoHebe

I guess. Whether the game was great is beyond me. But the adverts were boring at best. And, at worst:

This seriously bugged me. Partly because I'm not a big fan of Audi, or for that matter any other car whose name sounds like a hillbilly saying hello. I only ever see them for sale amdist Lamborghini and Porsche as a sort of concession prize for people who want a European car but can't go into six figures to get one. Kinda like going to Chevrolet and seeing Corvette and Camaro, and driving home in a Malibu.

The larger problem is that I know too many people who are actively praying for this orwellian circumstance to develop. We call those people ecotards.

I've explained this before, but it hasn't sunk in yet. So let's start over....

Actually, this is a good time to start over, since there's some new information. Specifically that we're finally to the point that even the stupidest people are lawling at the misnomer of global warming. At the very least, we can start to expect that meaningless term to die.

Al Gore didn't invent the internet, but he did make up global warming
--Anonymous

Global warming doesn't exist. That said: climateshift does occur. Aren't words fun? They mean things.

Why does climateshift occur? Lots of reasons. Most of them prehistoric. Few if any modern or industrial. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

Here's how Earth works. A star dies and supernovas. Its MatterEnergy floats around for a couple billion years, eventually congealing into new stars and bits of dirt, really. The bits of dirt float around, drifting toward each other in relative zerogravity, snowballing into larger bits of dirt, which we could call rocks. And the rocks drift into each other, compiling into bigger, oblate spheroid rocks which we'll call planets. One of them is Earth.

Smaller rocks, which we'll call meteoroids, drift into Earth, adding new and interesting atoms and molecules to the whole. A whole 'nother planet, in fact, drifts into Earth, dislodging the moon and changing Earth's rotation. A third planet, which we'll call Jupiter, hangs back beyond Mars being really very large and preventing most of the meteoric little rocks from drifting into Earth now that Earth is actually up to something.

Wait about three hundred and ten million years. Close to five times as long as it's now been since the last tyrannosaur died. And microscopic lifeforms called extremophiles compile autopoietically from amino acids developed back in the nebulae and deposited on Earth by drifting rocks over the last three hundred million years; the extremophiles are a bit boring, making even Paris Hilton look advanced, but they thrive in the lava for half a billion years until evolving into more advanced and less boring bits of RNA, and eventually DNA.

The bits of DNA are still a bit boring, but they're on the right track. Another couple billion years, and the stuff evolves into what we'll call the eukarya, which is bigwordese for reasonably boring multicellular life. If you're into big words, the eukarya evolved endosymbiotically from the prokarya which evolved from the protobionts which evolved from the extremophiles; if you're not into big words, go live in lava.

We now have mutlicellular life, and a couple billion years to go until it starts making adverts for European grocerygetters. This is something like progress.

To save myself some typing, and to cater to the creatards [the enemy of my enemy is my enemy], here's something I wrote a few years ago, lacking a couple new points of information, attempting to reconcile reality with biblical bullshit:

Creatards like to pretend that Earth was formed in BC4004. To accommodate this newish pretension, I've worked out a timeline for the planet, based on their date of origin, along with the fossil record:

 
Hope this helps....
—Gremlin, 25th July 2007; 17.58.34 Mountain Daylight Time

Let's focus for a moment on the beginning of the eighteenth century, back in the Mesozoic. Since that's really kinda my field, and there are a couple surprises there.

First, look just above it, where the Permian ends and so do nineteen in twenty species. The creatards being batshit LARPers, realise that this didn't actually happen within sight of the industrial revolution: this was 250million years ago. Just bear that in mind. Also this:

The neat thing, to me, about the Mesozoic is its global mean annual temperature. If Mesozoic is a big word, we can use another big word which people think they know: Jurassic.

Why's the Jurassic cool? Because it's not. Because, in fact, we've got dozens of millions of years to wait for velociraptors and tyrannosaurs and triceratops to evolve, despite the certainty of millions of morons who saw and misunderstood a laughable film. Also because it's really kinda warm.

Globally warm.

Like, as if global warming were happening.

Why's it happening? Because that's how Earth works. What, apart from really warm, is the Jurassic? Full of oxygen. Lots and lots of oxygen.

Enough oxygen that, though the north pole averaged tropical temperatures, animals were dwarfing modern elephants and most modern whales in size. Remember that too.

The Jurassic ends. We're into the Cretaceous. Huge animals: Tyrannosaurus rex and Edmontosaurus annectens and Titanosaurus indicus and so on. Because a hot planet, full of oxygen, allows them to thrive.

Then they die out. Those species, that is. Stegosaurs have been dead since the Tithonian; birds are in little danger. But all the cool things like the velociraptors and tyrannosaurs and triceratops that you think lived in the Jurassic die out at the end of the Maastrichtian Age, for whatever reason—probably not an asteroid, very probably a zoonotic plague, and very possibly a natural climateshift.

Hang on: don't think you know something yet. There's more.

A valid hypothesis [that's like a guess made by smart people, which isn't yet a theory; where a theory is a proved hypothesis] is that the ornithischians, at least, died out at the end of the Cretaceous, sixty-five million years ago, in response to a massive climateshift. Which, A) wasn't manmade [creatards: sh'up] and B) was a massive climateshift toward an ice age.

Ooh. The plot thickens as it freezes.

Yeah. A valid hypothesis is that things like tyrannosaurs died out because they'd evolved to thrive in hot, oxygenated environments which disappeared on them.

Not really a big deal in the larger scheme. The creatards have us into the twentieth century now. And we've got about eighty-eight years to kill.

Primates evolve; one of the newer ones is the human animal. The human animal dicks around for fifty-four months or 160,000 years depending on your psychosis. One reportedly gets nailed to a telephone pole. And, about fourteen minutes [or eighteen hundred years] later, the rest start producing carbon emissions.

This is largely seen as a good thing, for a while. Since it allows the human animal to control the environment. At least, within an enclosed space. Now humans can be warm and dry on average, occasionally making rain in the shower and snow in the fridge. Humans rock. Cats and dogs, which might rock even more, work out that they can be warm and dry for even less effort, by pretending to like humans. Spiders and snakes could pretend to like humans, but it probably wouldn't help much.

All until about forty years ago. That's realtime—not roughly the time at which shrews were trying to become rats, on their way to becoming human. Forty actual years ago, a bunch of hippies employing thinkaboutitism decided that, if something weren't done about pollution [and it really wasn't], we'd be deep into a lifekilling ice age by...ten years ago.

They were wrong. Or they were really good at reverse psychology, expecting pollution to worsen, knowing in 1970 that it would lead not to an ice age but to the thawing of Greenland. So, I'm going with wrong here.

So: great. It's 2010. The titanosaurs are extinct, because there's less oxygen and less heat. And the ecotards are telling us that there won't be less heat, unless there's not less oxygen.

The sentence made sense; the ecotards don't.

Unless, they're telling us, we don't lower carbon dioxide and raise oxygen, the planet will get warmer. Because they don't understand how the planet works. Because they don't understand much.

I've tried to talk to these people. I've tried to allow that they might know something I don't. I've tried asking how and why their little guess could happen. But that was my real mistake: it's not their guess; it's something they heard somewhere.

Ecotards aren't scientists. They're barely even junkscientists. They're gossipers. They heard somewhere that pollution [and of course the corporations producing it] are bad, because it crowds out oxygen, making things warmer.

When their rumours fail to impress me, they make the worse mistake of trying to appeal to my emotional side, which as a scientist I kinda lack: Don't you care that polarbears are dying? Isn't that sad?

No. Polarbears are evolved brownbears. They evolved and took advantage of a temporarily cold north pole. If anything's sad, it's that the temporarily cold north pole killed off Troodon formosus, which used to live there. I prefer troodontids to ursids; it's a palaeontologist thing, I suppose.

Moreover, if I happened to give a damn about the planet, I'd be watching for what it wants. And, since it seems to prefer it when the north pole is warm enough to support reptiles, I'd wanna work on making that happen again.

Not that I give a damn about the planet, being not emotional. I'm just aware without relying on rumours that life does better overall when there's less ice.

Of course, I'm also taking the ecotards at their inaccurate word, which is another mistake. Because—and ask any of them—they wanna Save the Planet.

Oh.

They want to save the planet from humans, primarily so the planet doesn't force humans to move out of Miami when the icecaps melt.

Because the icecaps are gonna melt. And the coastlines are gonna flood. And that's gonna cause problems for humans. It might even start to kill humans off. Which would be bad, because then...humans couldn't, erm...cause...global...warming...anymore.

Did I mention that ecotards are stupid? I really should.

In an effort to prevent humans from dying out, allowing them to stick around and cause the global warming required to kill humans off and make room for titanosaurs again, there are those ecotards who actually wanna see the Audi advert come true. Not the part where some sanctimonious, selfserving ecotard gets to drift into the carpool lane because he bought a nadaporsche: the part where everyone else goes to prison to hang out with the weed dealers because they didn't buy a soviet approved lightbulb.

These people are fucking idiots. And they vote. And they could conceivably get their way. And that kinda disturbs me.

Not much, of course. There's the reality of the scenario. Suppose I throw away a sodacan. Again. And, this time, I'm arrested and charged and arraigned and—objection: his honour is wearing an industrially textiled robe; move for mistrial. You show me an impartial ecocrime jury, and I'll show you a dozen naked people with bad hair and no makeup.

The absurdity of the fucking GreenPolice...you know what: whatever. Do it. Go for it. Vote. Let's do this thing. Make it illegal for humans to be anything more than furry, grunting apes. Whatever kills the species off the fastest, I'm in favour of it. Go. Now. Shut off the computer and go live in the woods. Get out of my fucking civilisation.

More later....