I was talking to a friend of mine yesterday about the weather. And at one point we had a discussion about the ice storm we had a few years back. And I commented that all this whacky weather is definitely a sign of global warming. He called global warming a hoax foisted upon the gullible. He asked if I believed in pet psychics too! He thought it was total rubbish. I was pretty shocked.
So I am crazy to believe in this global warming stuff? What do you all think of this? Do you believe in it?
Mods, I’m not sure where to put this, feel free to move it to a more appropriate forum.
Your friend is, to put it mildly, an idiot. The National Academy of Sciences, as well as the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change hardly fringe groups, have both issued reports stating that global warming is a real and potentially extremely serious problem. At this point, I would say that this position is endorsed by a large majority of the world’s climate scientists.
Folks not schooled in the scientific method, probability/liklihood and/or statistics oftentimes have a hard time believing anything that they cannot verify with their own five senses. Global warming is just too subtle to corroborate with the senses or memory.
Everytime we have a huge winter snowstorm or a severe cold snap, some witster will cry “So much for Golbal Warming!”
That said, because Global Warming does not follow a straight line, the slope has to be interpreted and therein lies the rub. To many scientists, Global Warming isn’t controversial but rather a question of how much, how fast.
There are others, however, how look at the same data and draw other concusions.
It’s been pretty firmly established that the earth is gradually getting warmer. What isn’t very clear is why. Some people will argue it’s man-made pollutants. Others will argue that it’s purely a natural process. Still others may argue that the sun is getting hotter. There are lots of different theories. You’re not crazy to believe the earth is getting warmer but if you’re going to argue about why, be prepared for a spirited (and probably unwinnable) argument.
I think most scientists agree that humans can and have had some effect on global weather systems. Just how much effect is what’s in doubt.
Also unclear is how much of the warming trend is natural and how much man-made. The global climate changes over time due to a bewildering variety of factors, and we’re not really close to untangling it all.
Another thing to keep in mind is that when they say “global warming”, what they’re referring to is simply a worldwide increase of average temperature by less than a degree. Locally, some areas may actually get colder, due to some non-intuitive effects that I’m not going to explain, because I don’t understand them.
Look, the Bush Administration – hardly fringe environmentalists – have officially admitted that global warning does exist (though they don’t think we should do anything about it).
Well, as with any system of belief, you are free to believe or disbelieve what you wish.* However, as has been debated here, you need to seriously weigh out how much your system of belief should affect your personal impact on national policy (meaning, how you vote).
One thing you should take into account is that the global warming theory has been taken up mainly by one political side to advance their agenda.
That by itself doesn’t make it untrue but it may lead to an unscientific conclusion.
Isn’t part of the scientific method to keep the current theory until you can prove it wrong - it seems that global warming is the chalenger to the current theory and hasn’t been proven yet.
As Colibri has pointed out, the view of climate scientists, as expressed in the peer-reviewed literature, has been summarized in the National Academy of Sciences and IPCC reports. And, while there are certainly still uncertainties, there are some basic points that are not in question:
(1) that CO2 and other greenhouse gases are increasing in the atmosphere due to human activity.
(2) that this will inevitably lead to an increase in global temperatures and other climate effects (floods, droughts, …), although there is still a fair bit of uncertainty as to the magnitude of the warming and the magnitude and nature of the other effects. [For example, the IPCC estimate is that it could anywhere between 2.5 F and 10 F by 2100.]
(3) that the net warming that has alreadly occurred over this century, and particularly in approximately the last third of it, is likely due largely to human activity.
Note that the main point of the article you cite here isn’t an issue of cause but rather an issue of time lag…i.e., the climate has not yet equilibrated to the amount of greenhouse gases currently in the atmosphere.
Actually, the views of IPCC and NAS represent the views of the scientists publishing in the field, who have a wide range of backgrounds and politics. The views, however, of the so-called “skeptics” like Patrick Michaels, Fred Singer, and a handful of others (who you find quoted a lot on the web) represent a clear political agenda and in fact nearly all of these folks have ties to fossil fuel industries and/or conservative think-tanks. As Donald Kennedy, the Editor-in-Chief of Science has put it in an editorial in that journal in March of 2001, “By now the scientific consensus on global warming is so strong that it leaves little room for the defensive assertions that keep emerging from the cleverly labeled industrial consortium called the Global Science Coalition (GSC) and from a shrinking coterie of scientific skeptics.” Hell, even companies like BP and Ford left the GSC and have basically accepted the scientific consensus on global warming.
By the way, in response to the orginal OP, I should say that it probably impossible to attribute any one event, such as an ice storm, to global warming. And, given the general variability of weather, it is even hard to measure to what extent extreme events have become more common. I would have to check back in the IPCC report to see the current status of what they feel is and is not known about extreme events. But, I believe that they have a fair degree of confidence that extreme events like droughts and floods will become more common due to global warming. They are somewhat less confident about whether or not they have actually been able to detect seen these effects occurring.
Try doing some searches on the thermohaline currents.
Basically, they’re temperature- and salinity-gradient-driven currents that are thought to be instrumental in transporting heat throughout the oceans.
If the concentration of salt or water temperature of the polar waters that sink and thus drive the currents changes by a relatively small amount, the water stops sinking and the currents grind to a halt.
The currents themselves take about a thousand years to complete a cycle, so it’s not clear when a cessation of flow would begin to have climatic effects, but many scientists fear that the magnitude of the potential disruption would be huge.
One of the possible effects would that the northern Europe would become colder, much like Alaska is now. N. Europe is as warm as it is because of the heat transferred by ocean currents, and if they stop or change direction, it’ll get colder, although there’s disagreement about the exact nature of the cooling.
The thing is, even if it’s so, what can be done about it? It’s like hair-loss; whatever you’re going to do about it, it will probably turn out worse than the original problem.
And once again, we come to something I asked jshore in another thread: regardless of the real truth and science, with what level of success can the average person determine what is good science, without a critical and well-rounded scientific background?
This last Winter, I heard the following two quotes from otherwise intelligent people, both with Masters degrees in Engineering. They were not joking, as I tried to debate them after they said what they said:
Person 1, on a 65-degree January day: “Wow, I guess global warming is right!”
Person 2, on a -15 degree windchill night in December: “I don’t care what anyone says - there can’t be global warming if it can get this cold!”
To the OP - you are not “crazy” to believe in a very strong case and very strong evidence for global warming being a real, present, and developing phenomena which must be examined and acted upon. But be very careful of buying completely what any side says about the timing, impact, and “worst-case/best case” scenarios. The truth is, while it seems to be likely to be occuring, no one knows what will happen as a result. It could be bad, it could be insignificant. But given the potential risks should the outcome be bad, many feel it is prudent to try and take some immediate steps to mitigate the effects, whatever they may be.
I object to the honesty of the “global warming or not” controversy because there are just too many people who look at the argument, and decide which side to take based on their attitude towards liberal/politically correct/democratic stances. They don’t know a thing about statistics, weather, or planetology, but BOY! DO THEY HAVE AN OPINION ABOUT GLOBAL WARMING!
Strange that they could become experts in such an esoteric field. Perhaps they now also have views on how effective cloud-seeding is? On the prospects are for terraforming Mars?
What we’re dealing with here is ignorant, politically driven public opinion. AKA bad science.
P.S. You don’t need to be crazy to have an opinion about global warming, but it helps.
As jshore has also pointed out, the scientific community, regardless of political affiliation, at this point is very much in agreement - my guess is 90-95% - that global warming is occurring, and that human activity is at least partly the cause. There continues to be vigorous scientific debate about the magnitude and timing of the effects and what can be done about it.
Twenty or thirty years ago, there may have been a tendency for global warming to have been taken more seriously by scientists of left/liberal political orientation. Now that much more evidence has accumulated, global warming is widely accepted by the general scientific community. I think that now the tendency is that the relatively few scientists who reject/question it tend to be those of a right/conservative orientation.
(Incidently, I am a professional scientist (biologist). I served on a U.S. Inter-Agency Committee on Global Change during the Senior Bush’s administration, and have worked with other organizations on the issue. I do not know of any of my scientific colleagues - who run the gamut of political affiliation - who reject global warming as being a serious concern.)
Correct (sort of) on the first part. On the second part, scientific theories are not generally considered “proven,” just more or less probable as determined by the evidence. Over the past decade, global warming has shifted from the “possible” to the “extremely likely” category as more evidence has been obtained. (In layman’s usage, however, I would say it was sufficiently likely to be considered “proven.”)
For one thing, you can buy a toupee.
There is of course extensive debate over what can or should be done about it. However, I for one do not plan to invest in seafront property.
I do agree with you about this interesting phenomenon of people having strong opinions on scientific issues that intersect with public policy, especially opinions that are strongly at odds with the views of most of the scientists in the field. In fact, I have in front of me a prime example, an article by one George Melloan, an editor of the Wall Street Journal ( http://www.opinionjournal.com/bios/bio_melloan.html ). He seems to be a reasonably accomplished journalist but apparently has no scientific credentials warranting mention in his bio; yet, he says “a United Nations-sponsored ban on Freon cost huge sums for retrofitting refrigerators and air conditioners, even though the science behind it was as flimsy as that for global warming.” [A statement which may sort of be true since it is merely comparative…but perhaps not in the way he meant it!]
I think it is important to take back science from the political realm. We can still debate what level of certainty of the various consequences is necessary before we should act on global warming or whether the the Kyoto Protocol is the proper approach…But, I think we should pretty much respect the view on the current state of the science as summarized by scientific organizations like NAS and IPCC, which have generally been beyond reproach.
Hell, as a PhD physicist, I don’t really feel qualified to personally evaluate the state of the science of global warming. (It’s hard enough to keep up with physics…hell, my own subfield of physics.)
