Hotcold Take: Astronomers Train Their Sights On ‘Climate Change’

Isn’t their job to kinda look out from the Earth? I mean, I guess if we’re saying “Astronomers study planets, stars, and other celestial bodies”, the Earth is a planet, but, Mirriam Webster states “the study of objects and matter outside the earth’s atmosphere and of their physical and chemical properties.” That would preclude the Earth. But, this is an insidious cult which puts its tentacles into everything

Alarmed by Climate Change, Astronomers Train Their Sights on Earth

On the morning of Jan. 18, 2003, Penny Sackett, then director of the Australian National University’s Mount Stromlo Observatory outside Canberra, received a concerning email from a student at the facility. Bush fires that had been on the horizon the day before were now rapidly approaching. The astronomers on site were considering evacuating, the student wrote. (snip)

All but one of Mount Stromlo’s eight telescopes were destroyed that day, along with millions of dollars in equipment that engineers had been building for observatories around the world. The fires also destroyed 500 homes across greater Canberra, and killed four people.

The incident was an early warning for astronomy: Wildfires, exacerbated by climate change, were becoming a problem for their field. Since then, several other observatories have been damaged or threatened by fires and other extreme weather, and changing atmospheric conditions have made ground-based astronomical research more challenging.

Apparently, lightning only happened after fossil fueled vehicles were invented. And could have been contained if they had gone after the fires more quickly.

Such incidents have drawn attention to Earth’s plight, and a growing number of astronomers are rallying to fight climate change. In 2019, professionals and students founded a global organization called Astronomers for Planet Earth. Astrobites, a journal run by graduate students in the field, held its third annual Earth Week in April. Also last month, a group of astronomers released “Climate Change for Astronomers: Causes, consequences and communication,” a collection of articles detailing the researchers’ personal experiences with the climate crisis, its impact on their work and how they might use their scientific authority to make a difference.

Sounds less like science and more like sociology

Other astronomers are raising awareness in the classroom, incorporating Earth’s climate into their research, or have left science altogether and become full-time activists.

Yup, a cult.

The modern scientific understanding of greenhouse gases is built in part on studies of Venus, a planet choked with heat-trapping carbon dioxide gas. At more than 800 degrees Fahrenheit, Venus is hot enough to melt lead — as well as the few probes that have managed to land on its surface.

Here we go again: what caused this on Venus, and why is that different from man-caused global warming?

Peter Kalmus, a climate scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, began his career searching for gravitational waves in the universe.

“I started feeling a lot of anxiety that I wasn’t committing my talents to doing something to stop global heating,” said Dr. Kalmus, who stressed that he spoke for only himself, not his employer. After a few years of research in astrophysics, he pivoted to studying the physics of clouds and, later, to using climate models to examine the risks of extreme heat. (Dr. Kalmus has also become an outspoken climate activist who has been arrested for his protest tactics.)

Cult. Anyhow, this is a very long piece describing the antithesis of science.

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