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Apr 22, 2007
we didn't listen I don't buy into the whole "global warming" catastrophe theory. It's not that I reject it so much is that I haven't been convinced yet. It's kind of tricky being in this camp, since most who have bought in automatically assume that this is the only possible conclusion one can come to if one is "informed." Therefore, to reject (or in my case, question) global warming means one of the following: 1. You are uninformed. 2. You are a hard-core right winger. In all of my discussions on global warming, I'm typically accused of one of the above. I am definitely not a hard core right-winger (not that there's anything wrong with that). And while I'm not the most informed on the issue, I am definitely as informed about it as those that I have these discussions (though I must admit that I have not seen "An Inconvenient Truth." My skepticism started during my meteorology class, when my professor, with no political agenda, informed us of his skepticism on the issue. As someone who studies this sort of thing for a living, I find his tesitmony to be credible. I have a couple of problems with the data, at least as it has been presented to me. Generally, whenever I hear someone preaching the gospel of global warming, they use some sort of single figure to drive their point home, whether it be a chart showing the rapid increase of the global temperature or something to the effect of "the average global temperature will rise 1 degree in 25 years (those figure were pulled off of the top of my head and do not reflect an actual number quoted to me)." The problem with this is that there is not a "global climate." Climatology,on a global scale, is a very complex thing. Even if there is a spike in the composite global temperature, that doesn't mean that this rise in temperature is evenly distributed. Even within the United States, climate and weather patterns are very diverse from region to region. Changes within climate are not something that can be quantified simply by coming up with an average. The other cause for my reservation is that this is just another entry into a long line of environmental catastrophes that have been predicted in my lifetime. I remember back in the 80's, it was acid rain that was going to destroy us. Then, in the 90's, the ozone was going to disappear allowing UV rays to destroy all life. Of course, nobody talks about these things anymore. My prediction: 10 years from now, global warming will be forgotten, and another catastrophe will be upon us. I also find it ironic that the same people who are worked up about global warming are the same people who complain about how imprecice meteorology is. posted
by Unknown @ 9:14:00 PM |
