So What About this Global Warming Deal

So What About Global Warming

I’ve never been able to jump onto the anthropogenic global warming (AGW) bandwagon, though I’ve had tedious discussions with ardent believers—really credulous people. (Look up that word and you’ll know what I mean) Their consistent fallback position is that there is a consensus out there and the science is settled, so any discussion is circular and futile. I will explain my reasoning here in the hope that there are some out there who can be reached.
Their consensus comes from computer models using many climate factors, particularly surface temperature. And this is precisely where the discussion first loses my possible agreement. This is a temperature record of the past 120 years at most, while climate has fluctuated up and down for millions of years without our input. It’s as if we use the last ten minutes to sum up our lives, and that would be just as meaningless.
They also used proxy records which are guesses based on ice cores or tree rings. And plenty of data is thrown out and denied as irrelevant. Logic tells me—this is not science, but throwing out that data makes it easier to manipulate what’s left for a desired result. And that is not precisely honest. So this science is not settled, just as our climate is never settled.
Records from weather stations are not always equal and I think that a good scientific process using temperature would try to achieve sameness of instrumentation, timing and specific distributions as just a few of the distinctions, and this is certainly not the case. There cannot be uniform placement of these units, so the data is isolated and relevant for that location and cannot be extrapolated across the globe. And even that is questionable given that the locale of many has undergone a very pertinent change since initial placement--urbanization. So I question the validity of such records and relying on them makes the entire enterprise surprisingly unscientific. Then I find that the data is missing some parts, and there you go, junk science we should use to re-order everything about our world, or perhaps not.
I suspect the computer models, if run on a daily basis with daily data sets, would produce different outcomes, enough to call the whole thing into question. Science must have results that will repeat or the experiment cannot be called valid nor the theory proven. It is not a matter of what people want to believe.
Another aspect of the discussion is the fact that statisticians call the data and conclusions into question. AGW proponents have convinced themselves that only climate scientists have the right to an opinion on the reports they have rendered, and no one from another realm of study is competent to discuss or understand. This is the creepy part for me—the high priests of climate change have spoken from on high, and mere mortals may not question the pronouncements they have made. But statisticians are precisely the folks who perform postmortems on scientific results, and if they do not find the results consistent with good science, then there we are. They cannot validate the conclusions because the data is inconsistent and the methods in which it is used are inconsistent. Which makes all of it junk science and a colossal waste of resources and time.
I have tried to do my own research and draw my own conclusions, which basically means I have decided that the Sun and our oceans are the main drivers of our climate and anything we do is minuscule. Sort of like the effect of fleas—we are not running the show in other words.
The sun has cycles of activity, with warming when it is sending out flares and full of active sunspots. Just now (January, 2009) it is being extremely quiet and the Northern Hemisphere is experiencing a terrible winter, which follows the terrible winter they had in the Southern Hemisphere.
We all hear about El Niño and La Niña, the Pacific Ocean circulation and temperature phenomena that affect climate all over the globe. They come and go and drought or flood or bitter cold weather follow. Both great oceans have both large and smaller scale oscillations in temperature and current, along decades long times. These affect winds and thus climate and are well known to science. Look up decadal oscillation and see for yourselves.
I have a somewhat contrarian view of the world. I always look for the guy behind the curtain first thing, in other words. The AGW crowd (and it is a pack mentality) spend a lot of time—a whole great big bunch of time—trying to convince the world of the rightness of their findings. They want to save the planet, and anyone who speaks against them is corrupt and evil. This is a huge turn off for me, especially coming from “dispassionate” scientists. Another is any “scientist” who routinely uses alarming tag words—cataclysmic, catastrophic, etc. A main offender here is the astrophysicist James Hansen who has been flogging this issue a long time. He is the guy always talking up the tipping point that is just over the horizon, which he has been doing this for over twenty five years. He is a high priest of this ideology around the climate and mankind’s effect on it.
Well, actually, these proponents seem more like zealots. I’ve seen the websites they have, with page after page of argument to assist anyone discussing the subject. And anything that might seem to refute their stuff, the reaction is predictable and pervasive, It is like a hydra-headed monster as it keeps coming back bigger then ever.
To be honest, I think we could control the climate just as well by sacrificing a virgin somewhere. It is as valid as their theory. Now we just have to decide how to do the sacrifice.