Introduction
First I wish to apologize for not using the much more scientific term 'climate change' instead of the term 'global warming'. The reasons for this are simple. The climate has always changed throughout Earth's history. Thus, everyone believes in climate change. Also, the Earth has not warmed or cooled significantly since around the turn of the century, and those climate scientists and politicians who keep telling us to be alarmed, much prefer the term 'climate change', to keep from being embarrassed.
Enough having fun at the expense our beleaguered climate scientists.
Since my last post on global warming, not much has changed about what the climate data shows: The Earth is warming at a rate of less than 2C per century.
A warming of 2 to 3C might be better for humanity, so maybe we should be celebrating.
What does the current data show?
I've looked at the temperature data from many sources, and as mentioned in the introduction, the actual data shows a warming at a rate of less than 2C per century.
And the climate models, which take many decades to verify, have mostly been wrong so far. Here's a telling graph that gives actual data compared with the predictions of 90 climate models:
The actual data are the blue and green dots. The black dots are an average of the climate model predictions. The actual data shows about a 0.4C increase over the last 30 years, which extrapolates to about a 1.4C increase over a century.
According to this chart of actual satellite and
surface temperature observations vs. what was predicted by 90 different
climate models, 95 percent of models overestimated actual temperatures.
So when you hear the, “95 percent of scientists believe in global warming”
talking point, you can now reply with “95 percent of reality thinks your climate
models are garbage." (Credit to Sean Davis for this creative reply).
And therein lies the real reason why so many global warming alarmists
are so desperate to change the terms of the debate. Rather than discuss
the actual science, they’d rather marginalize anyone who disagrees with
their policy prescriptions.
The global warming alarmists aren’t attempting to shut down debate
because they’re worried the dissenters are wrong; the alarmists are
attempting to shut down debate because they know their models are wrong,
and they’d rather nobody focus on that inconvenient little fact.
What should we tell the plants?
Tell them that our scientists at the United States Environmental Protection Agency (the EPA) have declared that carbon dioxide is a pollutant. Tell the plants that the EPA must have forgotten what they learned in 9th grade biology about the Oxygen Cycle and how plants absorb CO2 and give off oxygen, which animals tend to breathe in on occasion.
What should we do now?
Don't give in to any of the 'carbon tax' proposals. And don't lose sleep over your 'carbon footprint'.
But go ahead and support cost-effective conservation efforts, and support the reduction of real pollutants such as mercury and lead.
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Tim Farage is a Senior Lecturer in the Computer Science Department at The University of Texas at Dallas. The views expressed herein are those of the author. You are welcome to comment upon this blog entry and/or to contact him at tfarage@hotmail.com.
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1 comment:
Thanks so much for your insights, Tim. People unfamiliar with modeling somehow think it will predict the future, not understanding all the variables. The hurricane models are a visible example of the limitations of prediction (look at where the hurricane hits within the comparison of the predictive models). Models are helpful. They are the best predictive guidelines that we have, but people have to realize their inherent weaknesses and the large margin of error. My understanding is that weather has so many variables that patterns are looked at over hundreds of years, not five or ten. This will play itself out and I don’t want to lose any friends over it, but thank you for having the courage to share information on this. I see Facebook friends joking that anyone who doesn’t believe in global warming is too stupid to understand, so you are right. No more arguments from them, just insults.
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