If you think any of this gibberish looks interesting, you should poke around and subscribe to my RSS feed to keep up with new content.
Except, apparently, Dr. Hansen.
The fun thing about quibbling over global warming is that the argument is essentially “trends” vs “data points.” People who claim that we need to act to reduce emissions and do other environmental things want to tell us that each year is a little bit worse than the last, and it’s going to keep going that way.
Peopel who claim that there’s nothing to worry about want to say that, sure, while it may be a little warmer this year, it’s just one year. What does that matter in the grand scheme of things?
And the really good part is that if you actually look at climate study data, you’ll find at least five million different trends all over the planet. Some places are getting warmer, some colder, and sure, you can take an average, but what does that really mean?
So nobdoy knows what’s going on. All we’ve got are best guesses.
But I think it’s funny that we have an entire NYT article covering the fact that Dr. Hansen from NASA is being “softly censored” about global warming, but the article doesn’t even try to say what Hansen isn’t allowed to say.
That’s good censorship.
{ 2 comments }
Jens 01.30.06 at 9:59 pm
The way my geology professor explained it, glaciers around the world all advance and retreat at the same rate (adjusted for individual climates), providing one way to track the Earth’s temperature change. The geological record shows that the Earth is currently heating up towards an interglacial period (the opposite of a glacial period, which is like an ice age), so the fact that the average temperature of the Earth is increasing each year is not particularly alarming. Well, OK, it’s a little alarming, but it’s not something that we can do anything about.
The problem is that the temperature increase is occurring much faster than it should be, and that the rate of increasing increase is increasing. That’s a problem (and fun to say), not just because of the increased temperature, but because such a drastic change to the entire global climate might offset the cycle of glacial and interglacial periods. The offset part is only theoretical, and we wouldn’t see that kind of change for thousands of years anyway. But the temperature increase is very current and very real.
These are his words, of course, not mine. I got an A in the class, but I haven’t the faintest idea how they go about determining this stuff (especially that glacier measuring part). Unbelievably cool class, by the way.
Jens 01.30.06 at 10:04 pm
…by the way, thanks to that class and its unbridled awesomity, any mention of anything even remotely related to geology posted on a blog I read now warrants a giant comment from me full of every piece of related geological knowledge I can remember. So, yeah.
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