and now, on to climate change
i’ve mentioned in the environmental activism series i’ve been writing that my intent in those posts was not to deal with climate change - and it’s not. i think that our responsibility to the earth can be seen to lie almost entirely outside of global warming and climate change. so i do not want my premises and conclusions on those posts to be confused with the conclusions drawn in this one.
this ad recently ran in several major newspapers (LA times, NY times, etc) - for what purpose, i’m not really sure:
perhaps they’re really seeking to educate president obama. perhaps they want to provide a voice of dissention. and they have every right to do these things. but their hypothesis and conclusion might carry a bit more weight were it not for a few things:
1. a mis-representation of the facts and cherry-picking data. realclimate.org wrote a great post investigating the claims of this ad, which i’m going to reference a lot here - and is definitely worth a read on its own. they mention that the articles and studies cited in this ad (namely Swanson and Tsonis ) actually don’t lead to the conclusion that “surface temperature changes over the past century have been episodic and modest and there has been no net global warming for over a decade now.”
the idea that “global warming stopped” relies on statistics from short periods which most people (even people like me who are about the furthest thing from “scientist” ever) would see as faulty - you need to look at data over a long period of time.
from this pretty basic graph (yep, even i can understand it), you can see that while there have been some variations in the yearly temperatures (the blue lines are eight-year periods), the overall trend is on the up. (The red line is the annual global-mean GISTEMP temperature record.)
2. overlooking the definitive data that DOES exist. another article worth reading, from PolitiFact.com states:
The definitive statement on global warming comes from a 2007 study by the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a group of scientists from more than 130 nations. They concluded that the “warming of the climate system is unequivocal, as is now evident from observations of increases in global average air and ocean temperatures, widespread melting of snow and ice and rising global average sea level.”
3. credibility of the scientists and others who “signed” the ad. here’s an interesting example, via desmogblog.com: one of the undersigned, Susan Crockford, is an archeoanthropologist who specializes in the evolutionary theory of the domestic dog. not exactly a climate change expert. of course, there are some exceptions (although i couldn’t find a complete list of affiliations and fields of study), but i wouldn’t weight the opinion of a physisict or geologist the same as i would that of a climatologist. there are a lot of impressive titles and schools on this list, but that shouldn’t fool people. (although i would love to see a more exhaustive list of fields of study than those i found - maybe it’s more legit than it seems.)
my dad, for example, is an MIT-educated astronautical engineer: a literal rocket scientist. he’s literally a genius and a leading mind on space tehcnology and other things. but - no offense dad - i wouldn’t give a lot of weight to his personal opinion on climate change.
i’d be more likely to take my information from someone like Gavin Schmidt, a NASA climate scientist who was a reviewer on the IPCC study. he called the cato argument that there has been no global warming over the last 10 years “fatuous and false.”
there is a lot of information and a lot of data out there, and my point in this post is not to dissect it all, by any means. nor is it to begin a he said/she said debate where we throw everything against the wall and see what sticks. my goal was to point out the fallicies i see as problems and encourage people not to buy into one opinion hook, line, and sinker.
i go back to the question i raised at the beginning of this post - what was the point in the first place? was it just an exercise in dissedence? i have no problem with this, on the surface, except that the american people don’t need any more reason to live their lives without regard for the planet and the environment. far too many people, i’m afraid, think that the need for environmental action is dependant on the existence of global warming. and - i’m also afraid - this ad will provide them one more reason to disregard our responsibilities.
April 10 2009 12:07 pm | politics and soapbox