5 P.M. Friday, Sept. 6,2019

Some laughs in a serious situation

Looking back on some things said this week, it appears the U.S. coastline got off pretty easily.  We had plenty of damage, but nothing that could compare anywhere close to the damage sustained by our Bahamian neighbors just 100 or so miles east of Florida.

Meanwhile, I just couldn’t resist laughing at our Prevaricator-in-Chief.  Some really funny sound bites – actually, though, crying should have been my reaction instead of laughter.  But, when the Prevaricator speaks about science, funny things roll out of his mouth.  He’s the classic example of speaking first, thinking later.

1).  Alabama.  He postpones (or cancels) a trip to Poland because of the potential hurricane damage to Alabama.  No National Hurricane Center bulletins on Dorian ever mentioned Alabama.  There was never a potential threat to ‘Bama.  (Of course, now he’ll probably ask the citizens of Alabama to vote for him because he kept the storm away from them.  Prevaricator-in- Chief indeed,)

2). Cat 5.   Numerous quotes earlier this week about…Category 5, nothing like this has ever happened before.  Who can believe this?  Amazing, Category 5’s just don’t happen.  And on and on.  Trouble is, he used the same words over and over and over in 2017 when another Category 5 storm approached the U.S.  Are we talking about memory loss or slow learner or both.

3).  Nuke it.  Hurricanes should be no problem, says the PIC.  We can just nuke ’em.  In any other reality, that just makes matters worse.  Instead of a hurricane hitting the coast, we’d have a radioactive hurricane hitting the coast.  We’d need a far different system to clean up from that hurricane.  Why won’t nuking a hurricane work.? The amount of energy nature works with dwarfs what we humans can do.  The NHC estimates that a typical average hurricane releases an amount of energy equal to about 10,000 average nuclear bombs.  Over an typical 7 day lifetime, that amounts to about one bomb per MINUTE.

Basically, the PIC should keep away from talking about science.

P.S.  I’ve just had an even scarier thought.  What if his science advisers told him to say those things???