Is the Earth Actually Cooling?
Opponents of action on climate change are doing their worst to interpret the data to obfuscate the unmistakable trend of global warming. Today, their bamboozlement made it into the newspaper of record. The canard that global temperatures are somehow stabilizing or even cooling off was repeated in the New York Times:
The world leaders who met at the United Nations to discuss climate change on Tuesday are faced with an intricate challenge: building momentum for an international climate treaty at a time when global temperatures have been relatively stable for a decade and may even drop in the next few years.Climate Progress points to this chart from the UK's weather service, known as the Met Office, to set things straight:
The chart shows a clear trend towards warming, even with the anomalous year of 1998. If you take a large enough data set—and the evidence for global warming encompasses lots of data—it should be easy to find two data points that buck the overall trend. That's just what the skeptics have done. But no one with any serious understanding of statistics (or thermodynamics) could possibly mistake the warming trend.
posted by Tom Noyes at 6:56 AM
2 Comments:
Dear Tommy. You're saying the same thing every everybody says; "The earth is warming, therefore we need to spend trillions to fight it." Look, the skeptics aren't arguing that the climate does not change. The earth's climate changes, the skeptics get it. What the skeptics want to know is where is the conclusive evidence that humans are responsible? (not proof mind you, just conclusive evidence). Every time the skeptics ask for evidence, they show pictures of melting glaciers or stranded polar bears, or they say the permafrost is melting and eskimos are losing their homes, or they show pictures of floods and drought. These are evidence of climate change only, they are not evidence that CO2 is the cause. Just deliver the evidence and the skeptics will gladly join the climate battle. Otherwise, the skeptics will continue to fight climate action to the last breath, because once Cap&Trade is established, we will never be rid of it. Cap&Trade is forever bro, so you gotta be right about this.
Let’s connect the dots:
We know that CO2 is building up in the atmosphere well beyond the normal range going back thousands of years.
We know that CO2 reflects infrared light back to earth’s surface, leading to increased atmospheric temperatures.
We know that global temperatures are rising (again, well beyond the normal range), and closely track increases in CO2.
As for your comment that cap and trade being forever, what would really be hard to reverse is Delaware’s coastline being lost to rising seas. Once it’s gone, it’s gone.
Post a Comment
<< Home