But the Politicians don’t trust Science to believe it is Reasonable. Please read it all don’t stop without the entire picture! There is a SOLUTION to “Global Warming”
The efforts of Humans to control carbon-dioxide emissions and thereby reduce global warming is at most a few percent (95%)most of the emissions come from plants at night and some is converted back to oxygen and the carbon used in the plants in daylight. Our feeble efforts will have little effect.
Professor V. Ramanathan of Scripps Institution of Oceanography contributed to the book’s chapter on global warming. “Ram” (as he likes to be called) is the man generally credited with the discovery of the phenomenon of global warming, correctly predicting in the early 1970s that there would be a measurable increase in the temperature of the Earth’s atmosphere by 1980. I was happy to make the 200-mile trek down to La Jolla to speak with Ram in his laboratory.
Blue Planet Almanac founder and host Mike Austin was gracious enough to have me live on his radio show a few weeks ago. For anyone who would like to hear the podcast, here it is. Click on February 22.
Mike is a fantastic guy with a great mission. Best of all, he has and a warm and calming on-air demeanor — a good thing to have around, since I’m sometimes not 100% calm on live radio and television.
Tomorrow morning, I need to rush home from dropping my daughter off at school to be on a live radio broadcast, in which I’ll be speaking on the imperative to move to clean energy. Also featured on the program is a representative of the National Resources Defense Council. I interviewed someone from the NRDC for my book on renewables, so I’m fairly familiar with the cut of their jib. You have to like people who stand up and do the right thing under incredible pressure to yield.
In preparing for this live discussion, I’d like to try to concentrate on the basics; I’d like to make this is simple and as black and white as possible. But that’s not easy. The more I learn about this the more complicated I understand it to be. There is a lot to discuss about the subject of global warming alone, for instance. But discussions on the subject are usually 10 parts politics for every one part honest, objective science. I could prove that 2 and 2 are 5, using logic that I find in a lot of places.
The fact is that almost everything you read was written for a reason – and that reason is very seldom to inform you of the complete unvarnished truth. We’ve all come across the idea that global warming is a hoax. There is a paper being circulated now that takes this a step further, alleging that the hoax is aimed at creating enough fear in people that they will accept increased infringements in their liberties and ultimately a unified and tyrannical world government.
Personally, I’m a bit skeptical. I have to ask — in my mind, who has more credibility: thousands of research scientists – many of whom I’ve met and come to know as trusted friends — or a guy writing a paper with outrageous ideas and essentially no supporting evidence? Hmmm.
Passionate global warming skeptic Alex C. writes:
Scientific evidence, facts, truth, and “global warming” is NOT a democratic activity where whoever has the most votes wins … There is only one truth at it is not up to a vote. When so much politics, money, and power are involved it is clear that left wing socialists or environmenalist extremists could care less about facts. It is becoming clear that man made CO2 has not caused global warming…Please avoid using majority rule to make decisions.
Again (and I swear this is true) my blogging software asked me to approve your comment — even though I’ve set it so as to let everything but the most obvious spam through uncensored. Apparently WordPress seems to think you’re an extremist! :) Personally, I think you have your rights to your own opinions.
Having said that, let me tell this story. When I decided to enter the GW discussion a couple of years ago, I told a few friends about my concerns. “A 400 million year correlation between CO2 and global temperature doesn’t mean that CO2 increase causes temperature increase. What if temperature increase causes a CO2 increase? What if they’re both driven by a third parameter?” I asked.
My friends — each one — urged me to do my own investigation.
My response, which I would give again now, is simply this: I don’t have the hundreds of thousands of manhours to retrace all these scientists’ steps. I have to decide this for myself as I would if I were a judge hearing a civil case, i.e., trust in the veracity of the testimony of credible people, and base my decision (as I think you need to base yours) on the preponderance of the evidence.
What seems most credible here? That the vast majority of climatologists are leftists? That Marxist ideologies are shaping interpretation of enormous amounts of data in the halls of MIT, Cal Tech, and Scripps? Sorry, I don’t think so.
But you raise a good point. Will believing in the preponderance of the evidence in front of us always bring us the right answer? Of course not. It can fail us at any time, just as it did the people who believed the earth was flat 500 years ago. But it’s the best that I — or anyone else — can do.
I asked global warming (GW) skeptic Jarrett Buys to explain the melting of the glaciers as evidenced by photos taken over the last century and the data behind ubiquitous graphs like this one. Excerpts from his response include:
Man just isn’t that causative!
Of course there is more melting of glaciers globally; we are at the end of the interglacial period, which always shows the most amount of glacial melt – it’s been melting for 10 thousand years! Also, the pattern shows we always have a slight warm spike at the end of the cycle, just before we plummet into the next glacial period, which might just account for the 1/2 degree f. Increase since 1988.
I can’t comment on this graph. I would imagine this is part of the ipcc’s climate modeling system based on their computer models that “prove” them right.
I realize critics of “the other side” (such as you mention in your blog) already have a “pat” answer for the explanations of such data being provided; however, that does not automatically mean the data is false, it just means that your side has a predetermined answer for all data that does not agree with your theory.
Thanks for this, Jarrett.
You bring up good points about the motive for junk science: both sides have something to gain by convincing lawmakers of the correctness of their positions. But personally, I find this irrelevant because, from my perspective, evaluating the correctness of the anthropogenic GW theory is impossible due to the enormous scale of time and the number of variables. I grant that it really IS possible that there actually isn’t a problem, or, if there is, that mankind has identically zero cause in it.
However, while I can’t prove the theory one way or the other, I think any fairminded individual would have to concede that it’s quite possibly true — due to the preponderance of top thinkers whose collective research reaches this identical conclusion. Btw, unlike you, I attribute to man more than enough cause to ruin this planet — in any of a dozen different ways. I guess my position is that there is a reasonable probability associated with anthropogenic GW, and that this alone is enough to militate action — especially when we need to get rid of fossil fuels for 3 – 4 other reasons that have nothing to do with GW at all.
Merry Christmas everyone!
Had a great time at a friend’s “Stop By For a Glass of Chrismas Cheer” party last night; it was an opportunity to meet many wonderful people. It’s always amusing to get people’s reactions when I’m asked what I do in life. In almost all cases, people instantly relate to it, perhaps insofar as it touches almost everyone’s political beliefs: global warming is a leftist scam, it’s the apocalypse caused by unbridled capitalism and greed — and everything in between. “I’m just a reporter,” I assure them.
In any case, I was delighted that one guy said, “Oh I have to talk to you about investments.” When I asked him what he meant, he explained that many people are shut out from investing in the migration to renewables, since so many cutting-edge clean energy companies are private. I told him I would speak with some of my investment banker/broker-dealer friends about establishing a private placement memorandum to raise money for a group of carefully chosen private companies in need of capital across a range of relevant technologies.
It’s amazing the ideas you come across with a cup of hot mulled wine in your hand.
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