Month: November 2012

 

I have no idea what’s going on.

This morning I’ve run across several articles in the Register saying that new data analysis of global warming data may suggest that all the hubbub was in fact static.

One article in The Register suggests that global warming has been stalled since 1998.. New looks at the data, suggest that since 1950 the overall global temp has risen by only 1/2 a degree. 

Like all news media, I’m not sure that I trust The Registers reporting or their ability to even understand what they’re reporting well enough to be accurate.

However It’s intriguing to me that after all the wringing of hands and wailing… Things may not be as bad as we’ve been led to believe.

Normally I’d call this a “one off” but then the same publication reports has two other articles where they quote other sources suggesting a direct conflict with “accepted climate change facts”.

This article says that there’ve been no increases in droughts since 1950. But the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in a 2007 assessment says “More intense and longer droughts have been observed over wider areas since the 1970s.”

The article says that as our data modeling gets more refined the statistics regarding global drought were over estimated.

The IPCC 2007 report has pretty much been debunked as over blown and being wildly alarmist. However this new information will likely put a wooden stake in the IPCC report once and for all.

Another article suggests that yes the Greenland ice sheets are in fact melting. At the current rate of melt they’ll be gone in about 13,000 years. The actual effect on sea levels from the Greenland ice melt will be about a 5 cm increase in ocean levels by 2130. This is far less of a “lets scream and run around in little circles.” than has been reported in the media.

Yet Another article details the investigation into why Antarctic ice sheets are growing… This growth is limiting confidence in climate predictions. Scientists from NASA and the British Antarctic Survey have teamed up to see if they can unravel the reason for the ice growth.

None of this information is reason to go burn down a forest, or open a strip mining operation in Alaska. 

The publication of theses articles and the new data shouldn’t  be cause for us to stop being responsible inhabitants of the planet. We should continue to reduce our toxic emissions. We should search for energy sources that don’t damage the environment. That’s just being smart and responsible.

The common thread in each of the articles is that the data used to support the Global Warming arguments, AKA “Climate Change”  is plagued with signal noise.

Think of it like when the radios in our cars were AM only.

The further you’d get away from a town the more static you’d hear until finally you were only able to catch a word or two every few seconds.

The temperature and climate data is like that. You could perhaps make a sentence out of the one or two words you heard every couple of seconds. The accuracy of that sentence would be highly suspect.

Climate scientists are re-evaluating their data and applying better software techniques to filter out the “noise”. 

Couple these techniques with more sophisticated satellites and monitoring equipment and you get much higher accuracy. Then if you take the data feeds from the Mars satellites and instruments you’ve got the ability to make comparisons and refine our data about Earth.

This is part of normal scientific process.

Another part of this process is that you need to have scientists who are free to ask questions and express their opinions.

Consider for a moment how the press, governments, other scientists, and people in general treated scientists who questioned the claims that run away global warming was upon us and that the entire planet was going to burn… Next year!

Many of those scientists had their lives and careers destroyed. Simply because they chose to look at the data objectively and critically, which by the way they were trained to do. 

None of those scientists said it wasn’t a problem, they said the data was inconclusive. And they were right. 

Something to think about before you shout down someone with a different opinion than your own.

Just Saying…

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UPDATE

Since I saw the articles mentioned above yesterday, there have been several new articles that say OH NO… the Ice is really melting.

The most recent one is Here

Which of course kind of proves the point. The data is full of noise. 

Given that there is so much conflicting data, obviously further study is needed to understand what exactly is happening.

Again I re-iterate Just because the data is inconclusive and changing doesn’t mean that we have any right to be irresponsible in our utilization of the planetary resources.

We must change, we must learn to use less, recycle more, and in general be more efficient in our energy use. 

I’ve long advocated that in a computer age, with our communication technologies we shouldn’t all be driving to our places of business. If your business is digital in nature you don’t have to be in a cubicle in the heart of an office block 40 miles from your home. You can do your job from your computer in your home office just as easily.

That alone would reduce the amount of auto exhaust daily. But thinking more “outside the box” could take us so much further. We need to change our way of thinking about work, management, and efficiency.