Side note here!
While the words "global" and "atmosphere" and "chemistry" all show up in my resume, I'm not a climate scientist. If you want to talk about why our current chemical theory can't explain measurements of HOx and NOx compounds taken from an aircraft whilst flying over various parts of the earth, I'm your woman. My specialty is not climate, though I have a little technical knowledge in that area.
Another side story!
As evidenced above, GADS scientists are annoying. Have you ever heard a scientist talk without a disclaimer? Or in definites? I noticed this failing once when I took tiny baby Q to one of his monthly well-baby checkups. I could NOT answer in a definite.
Doc: "Has he been exposed to any lead?"
Me: "Umm..Not that I'm aware of."
I was unable to utter the word "No" without a caveat. This is exactly why it is so hard for scientists to talk to the media.
Anyway.
Al Gore has a new movie out, An Inconvenient Truth, which is a documentary on global climate change. Rotten tomatoes gives it surprisingly high marks for entertainment value, i.e., it's pretty well done cinematically speaking.
Reviews on the science in it from climate scientists have also been very good.
I'm afraid to go see it. I'm afraid of the knots it will trigger in my stomach. I suppose that's the entire point of the title, however. It's the truth, and it's QUITE inconvenient for us to have to grapple with as a species with the power to affect the world.
In fact, it is so inconvenient that the science behind global warming has come under attack both by our administration (don't get me started), and by the media.
And this pisses me off because it's totally undeserved. Folks.
There really is a lot of scientific consensus when it comes to global warming. The observations are clear in telling us that the earth is warming and that carbon dioxide is increasing. It's also well-established that the presence of CO2 in the atmosphere has the effect of increasing the temperature of the earth. The building blocks are indisputable.
Where the supposed controversy comes in is mostly whether the increase of CO2 is the largest thing that's causing the temperature rise, or if it's within what we expect from natural causes. And under that umbrella come things like attacks on whether we are including all the feedbacks in our analyses, and whether we're interpreting the data in the most correct way, and directly on models scientists use (this, in particular pisses me off because the folks launching the attacks have no idea about HOW these models are used. Misrepresentation, misrepresentation, misrepresentation. A typical approach by a scientist is to blanket the spread of expectations, so you run simulations with very aggressive scenarios and very moderate scenarios and assume reality is somewhere inbetween. So beware when you see folks holding up one model result and trumpeting about how "off" its predictions are. Bleah.)
The media feels it must present "balanced" viewpoints to be fair, but it ends up doing anything but that. If you present both sides of an argument, giving them equal weight, when in reality the weighting is something like, say, 99.5% versus .05%, is that really reflecting any kind of reality? This is the problem we're facing.
I could go on forever and bore most of you to tears by posting things on very specific science points, but that's not why I have this blog. I don't mean for it to be a place to debate science. In fact, that kind of site already exists. Let me lead you to a website called Real Climate, which is run by a group of respected climate scientists who are attempting to correct much of the misinterpretation of climate science for the public. They have very precisely and clearly addressed most of the issues that you'll hear about. Use their search tool to find posts relevent to your questions. It's a great site. Pass it on. Please!
By the way, there is indeed scientific consensus that global warming is occurring because humans are burning fossil fuels. We're not sure how fast it's going to happen or the magnitude of it, but the world is going to be a much different place, climate-wise, in another few decades than it would have been without human intervention.
4 comments:
Yes, this is scary and I also won't be seeing the movie, not that it would play here anyway, but I digress.
Jen, have you read Meltdown by Patrick J. Michaels? His premise is how global warming is all about media spin. The 1930's were actually warmer than now, the 1970's relatively cool (I remember taking an article to school for current events about "the coming Ice Age"!) and the current warming is well within the norm and basically, we all shouldn't worry our pretty little heads about it. Even if global warming happens, it may be beneficial, Michaels says. What do you think? Maybe this guy is a known crack-pot to those of you in the field...? To me, it made some sense and it certainly appealed to me because he really played up the media fear factor angle instead of it being a real environmental catastrophe. I'd recommend the book to you, not that I believe it is accurate but because I'd be interested in what you think about it.
"...why our current chemical theory can't explain measurements of HOx and NOx compounds taken from an aircraft whilst flying over various parts of the earth..."
This is profound proof of who is the scientist and who is the marketing major in this friendship. Good Lord, woman! I can't even remember which compounds those are, much less understand the context of that sentence.
LOL.
Yes I know Patrick Michaels well. He's a (in)famous global warming skeptic at the University of Virginia. In fact, oddly enough, there was an article in today's morning paper about him. It was all about how his funding comes almost ubiquitously from energy companies.
I am not impressed with him. He's one of the ones that totally misrepresented some early work on global warming by taking the "worst case scenario" model run the Jim Hanson did years ago, and blasting it for being so off. In actuality, Hanson's "most probable" scenario showed warming a little less than has actually happened.
I also read something about how one of his "famous" papers was in a non-peer reviewed journal and has since been found that he made a really stupid fundamental error, like forgetting to do a radians/degree conversion. Don't remember the details.
So yes, he's a quack.
i saw the movie a few weeks ago in richmond, virginia. be brave. go and see it or get the dvd when it comes out. everyone should. it's excellent. you won't be sorry.
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