12.17.09
I just read this summary and it pointed out a few interesting things:
Interestingly, it reaffirms my view of global warming – I would prefer less pollutants just because I like to breathe and would welcome technologies for cleaner air and water but the alarm over the glaciers melting and global warming caused mostly by humans vs mostly by natural causes is likely BS. Here is the full homepage of the data source:
Here is an interesting take from Casey’s Daily Dispatch:
At Casey’s, check out how the chart (by Mann) used by global warming “televangelist” Al Gore in his Inconvenient Truth shows the last thousand years of temperature data compared to the last 5,000 years on the fuller chart that they DON’T use (shown above) – global temps according to that chart are still much below historical levels and this could again, be completely natural. Why doesn’t Gore use the longer chart? I guess showing 5,000 years of data vs the 1,000 years would have been too much of an “inconvenient truth“ for Al Gore to use.
I admit that I don’t know much about this stuff but I’m sure ‘experts” like Al Gore don’t either(here’s a Times Online article questioning some of his incongruent statements). So let’s stop pretending we all know ‘for sure” what’s going to happen and look at the hard science. Personal theses by a few people should not be taken as laws.
And if people want to focus on clean water/air I’m all for that. But don’t preach end of the world if well-respected scientists can’t even agree on what will happen – because admittedly, they use computer models to figure out what might happen and let me tell you something about computer models from my field of finance (and for any model for that matter) – it depends on the data inputs and if some loon is putting in the inputs, or even if a non-loon puts in incorrect inputs, the data will vary widely – just as it did when financial modelers put together models on default rates for mortgages before the financial crash (fyi – they used inconveniently incorrect input data). My lesson from that is, don’t rely on models as a certainty.
And before some fool takes down our entire economy, let’s focus a good 2-5 years on this and rely on science – not on who can yell the loudest outside of UN offices. And certainly, if governments want to fund this research, I’m fine with that but let’s not fund it and be cheerleaders hoping “our side” is correct. Let’s approach it with an open mind and not do anything rash.
CG
PS here’s George Carlin on this issue:
