My Dad used to describe a flight he took from Hondo, Texas to Lowry Army Air Field in Colorado. Dad was in a spanking-new Army C-47, which was the Douglas DC-3 in uniform, a tough, durable cargo and passenger hauler with two big radial piston engines. As Dad described it, they ran into some bad turbulence during the flight - bad enough that the aircrew was worried that the wings would come right off that rugged old Douglas.
To make a long story short, the plane held together, Dad and the other young servicemen on their way to Lowry Field debarked with some bumps and scrapes, and life, and World War 2, went on. Because as long as people have been flying, there has been turbulence. I've sat through plenty of it myself; I remember one flight from Osaka to San Francisco, where the big Boeing 777 suddenly dropped a few hundred feet over the middle of the Pacific Ocean, and stuff was flying all over the cabin.
A recent Singapore Airlines flight had a really bad experience lately, with one fatality, and the United States diversity-hire Secretary of Transportation, Pete Buttigieg, wasted little time framing this as a climate change issue.
.@SecretaryPete says an increase in flight turbulence is one of the effects of climate change that "are already upon us in terms of our transportation."
— Face The Nation (@FaceTheNation) May 26, 2024
He says the deadly turbulence on a recent Singapore Airlines flight is "very rare," but "turbulence can happen and sometimes… pic.twitter.com/GIOvMHi7fh
Let's presume (I don't, but just for the sake of argument) that Pothole Pete is correct, and this one flight - this data point of one - encountered turbulence that it would not have encountered if not for, well, the Industrial Revolution. So that brings up a question, one that was not put to Pete Buttigieg: "And therefore, what?"
See Related: Pete Buttigieg's Arrogant Condescension: Compares Americans' Gas Vehicles to Landline Phones
Pete Buttigieg doesn't get these kinds of questions from the compliant legacy media, of course, because he's in way over his head (like most of the Biden administration, including the President and Vice President) and most of the legacy media aren't going to embarrass him. But as awful as the experience of the people on the Singapore Airlines flight was - and I in no way intend to minimize what must have been a horrifying experience - it was one flight.
Worldwide, there are between 13 and 18 million commercial airline flights per day. The overwhelming majority of those go without any incident whatsoever. Has anyone asked Pete Buttigieg to run the math on that and ask him what percentage there is in hamstringing our energy economy to possibly save one flight out of 13 million from encountering severe turbulence? In the interview, he even admits that this kind of turbulence is "very rare," but beats the climate change drum anyway.
Pete Buttigieg, who earned the nickname "Pothole Pete" for the condition of South Bend, Indiana's streets while he was Mayor, has very little idea what he's talking about. Is the climate changing? Yes, it always has done, and always will. As recently as the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, there were forests in Antarctica and tropical jungles in Germany. This was not due to titanotheres driving around in SUVs - it was due to the many and various climate cycles that the Earth has always and will always go through. Do humans, today, have some effect on the climate? Yes - some. Is it worth destroying our modern, technological lifestyle to deal with whatever effect we have? No.
And, once again, there is no mention of the one technology that actually could bring us cheap, clean, abundant electricity - nuclear power.
