Chad's spot for various thoughts, musings, poetry, ideas and whatnot

Monday, January 22, 2007

Perhaps you've seen the recent flurry (get it...flurry...I'm here all week!) of blogs/commentaries/"news stories" regarding forecasters and their claims regarding global warming at its causes. On one hand you have the person over at the Weather Channel saying that it is a well known fact that global warming is caused by carbon dioxide emissions from a variety of human created industrial processes. On the other you have some forecaster at a news station out of Birmingham saying that there is no evidence to support such a claim and that no TV forecasters he knowns thinks such a hypothesis is true.

For both of these people I have one small piece of advice: SHUT UP!

Now, the last time I checked, most TV forecasters aren't scientists. They're journalists who might, if we the viewers are lucky, have a background in the physical sciences; perhaps even a B.S. in Meteorology. Their job is to report on the weather and take the forecasts the National Weather Service produces (or in the case of the Weather Channel-the forecasts its own in-house meteorologists produce) and bring them to the public in some snazzy format. With almost no exceptions, none of these people has actually participated in scientific research at the level required to earn a Ph.D. While they may be accredited by the American Meteorological Society that doesn't make them researchers (what is means is that they're not supposed to be cranks...). I have no problem with them expressing their opinion but, by golly, they should state it as such, not overstate the claims real scientists are making and not say really dumb things like those who don't agree with their position should lose their AMS accreditation. But then again, they're not scientists and thus don't know how to conduct themselves in a scientifically ethical manner. Of course, you'd think as journalists they'd know how to conduct themselves in a journalistically ethical manner and claim opinions as such and keep them out of their "official" information channels.

So here's the where the global warming story as I understand it scientifically. Global warming is taking place. This is a scientifically established fact. That atmospheric carbon dioxide levels have been increasing at a fairly dramatic way over the last 40 years is also an observed fact. That the two are linked causally is a scientific HYPOTHESIS. While there are a number of computer simulations that link the two, there is still a good deal of work to be done to show causation at a scientific standard. In addition, there have been previously recorded episodes of dramatic global warming long before human beings were around to dump billions of tons of the stuff into the atmosphere. Thus, as any good scientist will tell you, there's more research that needs to be done and any claims should be stated tentatively at best.

Don't get me wrong, my personal opinion tends towards the "better safe than sorry" position. While I don't know if the increased levels of carbon dioxide cause this, they certainly don't help. I'd definitely like to see a hefty "pollution tax" placed on vehicles that get less than 25 mpg as well as more taxes on non-commercial consumption of gasoline and diesel fuel with the additional revenues funneled into creating efficient mass transit solutions not just in the cities but between various municipalities. I think we need to do some things to make sure that we aren't contributing to this because the consequences will be disasterous.

Anyways, that's my two cents worth. Thanks for reading.

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