First, it was the Ozone Layer Hole. Now, it's "Global Warming"...
Goodness gracious, but there are a great many people out there who firmly believe in global warming. I suppose I shouldn't be so surprised. After all, by definition, at least half the people out there are of below-average intelligence. Add in the ones that were bored out of their skulls in high school or college, and therefore didn't pay careful attention in Meteorology 101, and you get quite a few people unfamiliar with the realities of how global weather systems actually work.
Well, I doubt anything I say here will change what passes for their minds. I could share how I'm old enough to recall articles like "The Coming Ice Age", published by our friends at Time Magazine in the early 70s, but it probably doesn't matter. They've made their minds up, and it would be cruel to confuse them with facts.
The facts are that all scientists require funding to continue their research. The best way to assure funding is to obtain a large amount of publicity - the more lurid the better. Thus, your average scientist, who has the term "publish or perish" embroidered on his or her underwear, becomes a professional doomsayer, a sort of real-world Chicken Little. This would no doubt explain such amazing "scientific possibilities" as Nuclear Winter, The Giant Earth-Crushing Asteroid From Space, and my all-time favorite, Global Warming.
Please understand, this was first presented as a side effect of the infamous Hole In The Ozone Layer, itself supposedly caused by chlorofluorocarbons (Du Pont's trade name for them is Freon) released by the Evil Humans (one day, I shall understand why a dam built by beavers is supposedly far preferable to one built by humans). When the hole, which had been growing larger, inexplicably started growing smaller all by itself (showing that humans had far less to do with the hole than does periodicity in solar flux), it mysteriously disappeared from the public's radar screens, and the former side-effect, Global Warming, took center stage.
Global warming is supposedly caused by carbon dioxide and other "greenhouse gasses," which rather than being something that can fairly easily be replaced or eliminated like was Freon, is part and parcel of daily human activity. Heck, humans produce carbon dioxide simply by breathing! How wonderful, then, to find something to blame that not only cannot be eliminated from daily life, but is produced by every breathing creature on the planet. Here's the ticket to permanent funding, a substance that can also be used for political purposes, to shut down the industrial production of advanced nations. Now there's a use for science!
To be sure, they can trot out a great deal of statistical data to "prove" their hypothesis, but I'm reminded of Twain's immortal line: "There are three kinds of lies - lies, damned lies, and statistics." In other words, figures don't lie, but liars figure. Yes, you've heard it before, but Twain didn't say it, so I won't quote it. What I will quote is information from one Douglas V. Hoyt, whose website (http://users.erols.com/dhoyt1/) has a great deal of interesting information on global warming, and why he thinks it's all hooey.
To paraphrase Mr. Hoyt, there's a reason why there seems to be a rise in global temperatures: observational error. You see, the mark of the scientific method is repeatability. If you can't make it happen more than once, it didn't really happen. A perfect example of this is "cold fusion." It sure would be nice to have cold fusion, but the experiments weren't repeatable. Well, Mr. Hoyt wanted to confirm the global warming results, but there was a problem. While the stats for land-based temperature readings seemed to show a very slight upward trend, satellite observations disagreed, showing a slight downward trend. Research turned up the reason for this anomaly: a combination of tree growth and new building (both of which block sightlines to cooler air, artificially boosting observed temperatures). In other words, the satellites saw the real temperatures, while the ground stations slowly lost their baselines over time. Oops.
Still not convinced? Well, the well-regarded Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution also suggests that rapid climatological changes could be linked to "greenhouse gasses," resulting in a mini-ice age for the northern hemisphere in the near future (please see http://www.whoi.edu/institutes/occi/currenttopics/ct_abruptclimate.htm/). While this counterintuitive leap is blamed on a drop in salinity of seawater in the Gulf Stream off North America's coast (due, supposedly, to global warming induced melting of polar ice caps), I continue to have my doubts. If the polar ice caps have melted enough to cause changes in the oceanic flows, why are we not hearing reports of coastal flooding? Should we not be hearing reports of coastlines disappearing under water globally? I suspect that somebody is pulling our legs, or believes we're gullible enough to buy anything a scientist wants to blurt out. I wouldn't bet my funding on it, sport.
No, anybody who was paying attention in class can tell you why the ozone layer hole is closing, or why the purported "greenhouse effect" is self-correcting: both are closed-loop systems. Ozone is ionized oxygen, caused when solar wind hits oxygen atoms in the upper atmosphere, knocking off electrons. The more ozone is created, the less solar wind gets through, and the less ozone is created. When less ozone is created, more solar wind gets through, making more ozone. Add in the fact that the eruption of a single volcano (say, the Phillipines' Mount Pinatubo in 1991) released more naturally occurring chlorofluorocarbons into the atmosphere in one day than were ever manufactured by Man, and you begin to see how silly these claims really are. Global warming is the same way. More heat causes greater evaporation, causing more cloud cover, which cools the earth by radiating away more sunlight. Once cooling occurs, the clouds dissipate, and sunlight returns. Self-regulating systems, all of them. If one believes in a supreme being, this would be a most humbling observation.
Of course, I could be absolutely wrong. After all, I'm not a professional skeptic. I leave that to cynics, who (as has been observed) know the cost of everything, but the value of nothing. I like to keep an open mind, but I don't leave it so far open that things fall out. I'm sure that one way or another, we'll find out the truth, although quite probably not in our own lifetimes. In the meantime, I wouldn't suggest starting an office pool.
Goodness gracious, but there are a great many people out there who firmly believe in global warming. I suppose I shouldn't be so surprised. After all, by definition, at least half the people out there are of below-average intelligence. Add in the ones that were bored out of their skulls in high school or college, and therefore didn't pay careful attention in Meteorology 101, and you get quite a few people unfamiliar with the realities of how global weather systems actually work.
Well, I doubt anything I say here will change what passes for their minds. I could share how I'm old enough to recall articles like "The Coming Ice Age", published by our friends at Time Magazine in the early 70s, but it probably doesn't matter. They've made their minds up, and it would be cruel to confuse them with facts.
The facts are that all scientists require funding to continue their research. The best way to assure funding is to obtain a large amount of publicity - the more lurid the better. Thus, your average scientist, who has the term "publish or perish" embroidered on his or her underwear, becomes a professional doomsayer, a sort of real-world Chicken Little. This would no doubt explain such amazing "scientific possibilities" as Nuclear Winter, The Giant Earth-Crushing Asteroid From Space, and my all-time favorite, Global Warming.
Please understand, this was first presented as a side effect of the infamous Hole In The Ozone Layer, itself supposedly caused by chlorofluorocarbons (Du Pont's trade name for them is Freon) released by the Evil Humans (one day, I shall understand why a dam built by beavers is supposedly far preferable to one built by humans). When the hole, which had been growing larger, inexplicably started growing smaller all by itself (showing that humans had far less to do with the hole than does periodicity in solar flux), it mysteriously disappeared from the public's radar screens, and the former side-effect, Global Warming, took center stage.
Global warming is supposedly caused by carbon dioxide and other "greenhouse gasses," which rather than being something that can fairly easily be replaced or eliminated like was Freon, is part and parcel of daily human activity. Heck, humans produce carbon dioxide simply by breathing! How wonderful, then, to find something to blame that not only cannot be eliminated from daily life, but is produced by every breathing creature on the planet. Here's the ticket to permanent funding, a substance that can also be used for political purposes, to shut down the industrial production of advanced nations. Now there's a use for science!
To be sure, they can trot out a great deal of statistical data to "prove" their hypothesis, but I'm reminded of Twain's immortal line: "There are three kinds of lies - lies, damned lies, and statistics." In other words, figures don't lie, but liars figure. Yes, you've heard it before, but Twain didn't say it, so I won't quote it. What I will quote is information from one Douglas V. Hoyt, whose website (http://users.erols.com/dhoyt1/) has a great deal of interesting information on global warming, and why he thinks it's all hooey.
To paraphrase Mr. Hoyt, there's a reason why there seems to be a rise in global temperatures: observational error. You see, the mark of the scientific method is repeatability. If you can't make it happen more than once, it didn't really happen. A perfect example of this is "cold fusion." It sure would be nice to have cold fusion, but the experiments weren't repeatable. Well, Mr. Hoyt wanted to confirm the global warming results, but there was a problem. While the stats for land-based temperature readings seemed to show a very slight upward trend, satellite observations disagreed, showing a slight downward trend. Research turned up the reason for this anomaly: a combination of tree growth and new building (both of which block sightlines to cooler air, artificially boosting observed temperatures). In other words, the satellites saw the real temperatures, while the ground stations slowly lost their baselines over time. Oops.
Still not convinced? Well, the well-regarded Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution also suggests that rapid climatological changes could be linked to "greenhouse gasses," resulting in a mini-ice age for the northern hemisphere in the near future (please see http://www.whoi.edu/institutes/occi/currenttopics/ct_abruptclimate.htm/). While this counterintuitive leap is blamed on a drop in salinity of seawater in the Gulf Stream off North America's coast (due, supposedly, to global warming induced melting of polar ice caps), I continue to have my doubts. If the polar ice caps have melted enough to cause changes in the oceanic flows, why are we not hearing reports of coastal flooding? Should we not be hearing reports of coastlines disappearing under water globally? I suspect that somebody is pulling our legs, or believes we're gullible enough to buy anything a scientist wants to blurt out. I wouldn't bet my funding on it, sport.
No, anybody who was paying attention in class can tell you why the ozone layer hole is closing, or why the purported "greenhouse effect" is self-correcting: both are closed-loop systems. Ozone is ionized oxygen, caused when solar wind hits oxygen atoms in the upper atmosphere, knocking off electrons. The more ozone is created, the less solar wind gets through, and the less ozone is created. When less ozone is created, more solar wind gets through, making more ozone. Add in the fact that the eruption of a single volcano (say, the Phillipines' Mount Pinatubo in 1991) released more naturally occurring chlorofluorocarbons into the atmosphere in one day than were ever manufactured by Man, and you begin to see how silly these claims really are. Global warming is the same way. More heat causes greater evaporation, causing more cloud cover, which cools the earth by radiating away more sunlight. Once cooling occurs, the clouds dissipate, and sunlight returns. Self-regulating systems, all of them. If one believes in a supreme being, this would be a most humbling observation.
Of course, I could be absolutely wrong. After all, I'm not a professional skeptic. I leave that to cynics, who (as has been observed) know the cost of everything, but the value of nothing. I like to keep an open mind, but I don't leave it so far open that things fall out. I'm sure that one way or another, we'll find out the truth, although quite probably not in our own lifetimes. In the meantime, I wouldn't suggest starting an office pool.