joejv4
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This topic will likely have some very polarized points of view, however, I am hoping it generates a good healthy exchange.
My personal thought on Global Warming, now called Climate Change because we're no longer sure that the planet is warming, but "we must do something to protect the environment for the polar bears" is nothing more than politics at its worst.
During the 1970's, the big scare went out that the planet was cooling and we were headed into the next glaciation. In 30 years, we suddenly went from cooling to warming.
Now, why do I not buy into what we're being told by the likes of former Vice President Al Gore and the UN sponsored IPCC? There are multiple reasons.
1) Lack of data.
- "Oh, but they have tons of data!!!"
- NO, "they" don't. How long have we had the ability to measure surface temperatures on a "global" scale? Maybe 50 years, and those measurements have only started becoming relatively accurate and timely within the last 25 - 30 years. So, armed with this knowledge, what are the IPCC-types using for a baseline? Answer: A guess and some computer models.
- "But there's the evidence from the ice cores!!!"
- Ummmm, last I checked, "ice" exists at temperatures at or below 32 F or 0 C. How does ice from either of the polar regions tell us what the temperature was in Kansas 5000 years ago? It doesn't. It tells us that the core site was cold enough for ice and snow 5000 years ago. It tells us some of what the content of the atmosphere was 5000 years ago at the site of the core sample. It even tells us how much snow fell at the site of the core sample 5000 years ago, but it does not tell us the average global serface temperature (no matter how much the global warming proponents want to "infer" from what the ice contains)
-"The tree ring evidence proves it!"
-Somehow, I can't get myself to make a leap to global warming based on an analysis of the rings of three "cherry-picked" trees from Siberia. On top of the fact that since they came from one region, they demonstrate "weather" not "climate"
-"There is data that proves that the mean global surface temperature has risen in the last 20 years!"
-Yep, it's gone up a whopping fraction of one degree. What does that tell me? Not much of anything since it does not show any clear long-term trend - and again, there is the question of what is being used for a baseline. Pick a year with a strong El Nino for a baseline - low and behold, the mean global surface temperature has decreased!!!!!
-"But the greenhouse effect! Everybody knows how greenhouses work"
-Fortunately we don't live in a greenhouse. The atmosphere does not behave like a greenhouse. A greenhouse is a controlled environment, where our atmosphere is anything but controlled. There are so many variables that play in the way that our atmosphere behaves that the whole notion of applying "the greenhouse effect" to it, is a load of... nonsense.
2) Politics and Science should not mix.
A scientist that has been given a grant by politicians to "Study Global Warming", must start with the premise that global warming is a fact - if they want continued funding (read - employment).
A thought to ponder: The notion of "Global Warming" followed on the heels of the end of the Cold War. For 40 years, governments used the fear of MAD (Mutual Assured Destruction) to influence and to some extent control their citizens. Fear is a powerful tool for a government, be it a real fear or one manufactured for that sole purpose. Suddenly, when the Berlin Wall fell, the MAD mechanism for controlling people went away, and the current terrorist threat had not fully developed. What could governments do to instill fear in their populations and thus exert their wills (and more importantly, political agendas) on the masses? Hmmm, the environment is a good one - in fact it's an awesome one!!! Think about it. Fear of the end of the world, driven by SUV's and factories. And even better, since we're talking about saving our planet for our grandchildren, who will argue against the need to go "green". We can push all sorts of political agendas, all in the name of saving the planet!!!! Eureka! We've discovered the Holy Grail for political leverage!!!!! Now, lets fund some struggling science programs with big money to study "Global Warming". Notice the choice of words. I didn't say "study global climate trends", and that's the same way that governments approached the use of Global Warming as their instrument of control. By the time the IPCC was assembled by the UN, the notion of Global Warming was already a foregone conclusion, and it became the mission of the IPCC to assemble data to support Global Warming and to discount data that runs contrary to it.
3) We do not have the technology to accurately model climate. Think of it this way. Today's meteorologists have continuous feeds of weather data that they feed into their computer models to forecast the weather. How accurate is your local weather forecast? One day out, pretty good - in fact, generally speaking, they are able to fairly accurately forecast what will be happening down to a given 8 hour period of the day. Pretty impressive... until we start to look at two days out, three days out, and the week-ahead forecasts. How accurate are those forecasts? Not very accurate. They are able to give you a temperature range and a percent chance of percipitation, but as the day draws closer, the forecast almost always changes. If we can not predict the weather for a specific locale, one week out, how am I to believe that anybody can predict the climate of the entire planet over the next 5, 10, or 20 years?!
Computer models are only as accurate as the data that is fed to them. In the case of local weather forecasting, very accurate real-time data is constantly fed into these models - and the still manage to get it wrong. How is it, then, that the Climate Change models can be right - when they utilize some real-time, accurate data, coupled with a lot of inferred, possibly incorrect data, and have no way to account for the complexity of the world wide weather patterns or variability in the atmosphere itself? Again, there is also the question of what do these models use for a baseline. Short answer - they can not, with any statistically relevance, predict anything.
That's my quick perspective on Global Warming. What is yours, and why?
My personal thought on Global Warming, now called Climate Change because we're no longer sure that the planet is warming, but "we must do something to protect the environment for the polar bears" is nothing more than politics at its worst.
During the 1970's, the big scare went out that the planet was cooling and we were headed into the next glaciation. In 30 years, we suddenly went from cooling to warming.
Now, why do I not buy into what we're being told by the likes of former Vice President Al Gore and the UN sponsored IPCC? There are multiple reasons.
1) Lack of data.
- "Oh, but they have tons of data!!!"
- NO, "they" don't. How long have we had the ability to measure surface temperatures on a "global" scale? Maybe 50 years, and those measurements have only started becoming relatively accurate and timely within the last 25 - 30 years. So, armed with this knowledge, what are the IPCC-types using for a baseline? Answer: A guess and some computer models.
- "But there's the evidence from the ice cores!!!"
- Ummmm, last I checked, "ice" exists at temperatures at or below 32 F or 0 C. How does ice from either of the polar regions tell us what the temperature was in Kansas 5000 years ago? It doesn't. It tells us that the core site was cold enough for ice and snow 5000 years ago. It tells us some of what the content of the atmosphere was 5000 years ago at the site of the core sample. It even tells us how much snow fell at the site of the core sample 5000 years ago, but it does not tell us the average global serface temperature (no matter how much the global warming proponents want to "infer" from what the ice contains)
-"The tree ring evidence proves it!"
-Somehow, I can't get myself to make a leap to global warming based on an analysis of the rings of three "cherry-picked" trees from Siberia. On top of the fact that since they came from one region, they demonstrate "weather" not "climate"
-"There is data that proves that the mean global surface temperature has risen in the last 20 years!"
-Yep, it's gone up a whopping fraction of one degree. What does that tell me? Not much of anything since it does not show any clear long-term trend - and again, there is the question of what is being used for a baseline. Pick a year with a strong El Nino for a baseline - low and behold, the mean global surface temperature has decreased!!!!!
-"But the greenhouse effect! Everybody knows how greenhouses work"
-Fortunately we don't live in a greenhouse. The atmosphere does not behave like a greenhouse. A greenhouse is a controlled environment, where our atmosphere is anything but controlled. There are so many variables that play in the way that our atmosphere behaves that the whole notion of applying "the greenhouse effect" to it, is a load of... nonsense.
2) Politics and Science should not mix.
A scientist that has been given a grant by politicians to "Study Global Warming", must start with the premise that global warming is a fact - if they want continued funding (read - employment).
A thought to ponder: The notion of "Global Warming" followed on the heels of the end of the Cold War. For 40 years, governments used the fear of MAD (Mutual Assured Destruction) to influence and to some extent control their citizens. Fear is a powerful tool for a government, be it a real fear or one manufactured for that sole purpose. Suddenly, when the Berlin Wall fell, the MAD mechanism for controlling people went away, and the current terrorist threat had not fully developed. What could governments do to instill fear in their populations and thus exert their wills (and more importantly, political agendas) on the masses? Hmmm, the environment is a good one - in fact it's an awesome one!!! Think about it. Fear of the end of the world, driven by SUV's and factories. And even better, since we're talking about saving our planet for our grandchildren, who will argue against the need to go "green". We can push all sorts of political agendas, all in the name of saving the planet!!!! Eureka! We've discovered the Holy Grail for political leverage!!!!! Now, lets fund some struggling science programs with big money to study "Global Warming". Notice the choice of words. I didn't say "study global climate trends", and that's the same way that governments approached the use of Global Warming as their instrument of control. By the time the IPCC was assembled by the UN, the notion of Global Warming was already a foregone conclusion, and it became the mission of the IPCC to assemble data to support Global Warming and to discount data that runs contrary to it.
3) We do not have the technology to accurately model climate. Think of it this way. Today's meteorologists have continuous feeds of weather data that they feed into their computer models to forecast the weather. How accurate is your local weather forecast? One day out, pretty good - in fact, generally speaking, they are able to fairly accurately forecast what will be happening down to a given 8 hour period of the day. Pretty impressive... until we start to look at two days out, three days out, and the week-ahead forecasts. How accurate are those forecasts? Not very accurate. They are able to give you a temperature range and a percent chance of percipitation, but as the day draws closer, the forecast almost always changes. If we can not predict the weather for a specific locale, one week out, how am I to believe that anybody can predict the climate of the entire planet over the next 5, 10, or 20 years?!
Computer models are only as accurate as the data that is fed to them. In the case of local weather forecasting, very accurate real-time data is constantly fed into these models - and the still manage to get it wrong. How is it, then, that the Climate Change models can be right - when they utilize some real-time, accurate data, coupled with a lot of inferred, possibly incorrect data, and have no way to account for the complexity of the world wide weather patterns or variability in the atmosphere itself? Again, there is also the question of what do these models use for a baseline. Short answer - they can not, with any statistically relevance, predict anything.
That's my quick perspective on Global Warming. What is yours, and why?
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