In the wake of the Academy Awards' coronation of Al Gore last night, putatively over his documentary win for "An Inconvenient Truth", let me give you my off-the-cuff take on Global Warming. (Or is it now more politically correctly "Global Climate Change", given the inconvenient truth that we're being hammered with snowstorm after snowstorm in the last two months? )
I saw the movie as a DVD rental. I'll have to say it was a decently done documentary, as they go. Slanted with a bias as documentaries almost always are, but way more straightforward than "Farenheit 911", for example. It kept my interest. It made it's point. Probably worth an award. I disagreed with a lot of the content, but I'll give it props for quality.
Consider me not convinced on the topic of Global Warming. Granted, I'm not an internationally recognized climatologist. Just a blogger in my pajamas. But, I do read up on the topic and have reached my own conclusion, Al Gore's mega-stature in Hollywood notwithstanding.
Let me just throw out a couple of observations on the topic from my POV:
1. When you think of accuracy in scientific endeavors, do you generally think of meterologists leading the way. Do you trust you local weatherman more than 50/50 to help you decide whether to take a sweater with you next Tuesday? Yet, somehow we're supposed to trust them to know what the temperature of the earth's surface was 2000 years ago so that we know it's warmer now? Really?
2. Clearly the activists on the topic cherry pick their evidence. Did it escape everyone's notice that activists were pointing and shouting "Aha!" during the heavy hurricane season of 2005 (especially Katrina), but were completely silent in 2006 when not one major hurricane hit the continental U.S.? If the earth is "warming", which implies movement in one direction, and the 2005 season was so obviously a clear effect and result of the warming, then how does it just pause for 2006?
3. I don't doubt that the earth's climate changes. I'm sure it has throughout the whole history of the earth. It changes from hour to hour, from day to day, from year to year. Probably from century to century and milenium to milenium. I just don't think that the recent changes are significantly attributable to human activity. It's hubris, born of a sense of technological mastery, to think that we are that able to effect weather patterns on the earth to that degree.
4. Moraines. Lots of them in the state where I live. I learned about moraines in some university science course or other, and I can even recognize some of them in the terrain around me. Let me just simplify it to say they are terrain deformations caused by advancing or retreating glaciers. Picture a glacier pushing up a pile of dirt in front of it as it advances, leaving a mound in place when it retreats. Voila!, a moraine. Lots of them sticking up from the cornfields in the midwest. Evidence of glaciers covering our area, even this far south, with the last time being some 14 thousand years ago. Obviously, since I'm not covered in ice and am able to breathe, they are not here now. Why not? What caused the warming that caused the end of the Ice Age and the glacier's retreat if General Motors wasn't around yet to produce cars that cause emissions that form greenhouse gases that cause Global Warming?
5. Ocam's Razor. The simplest answer is usually the right one. In this case, the simplest cause of the earth's warming - if it exists - is the sun! Yes, that giant yellow heater in the sky. Here you need to know only two salient facts: 1) the sun's output varies and 2) we are a fixed distance away. (93 million miles, as I learned for some quiz or other in an Astonomy class). When the sun's output decreases, we get colder. When it increases, we get hotter. Class dismissed.
Oh, you need a scientist to say it? Go here and read about it.
So, I am amply not convinced that human activity is to blame for any global climate change. Sorry.
Having said that, that's not to say that we don't have things to learn and improvements to make in the way we use energy. I got that point in my visit last year to Europe, and even from Mr. Gore's movie. That was useful. It's reasonable to say that we do waste a lot of energy, and we should do better. We can say that without all of the panic crisis talk and the blaming-humans-first fingerpointing.
I'm off to bed, and I'll turn the thermostat down as I go to save a little energy. But, it's a sacrifice because it's sure been cold outside lately.
No comments:
Post a Comment