Related to:environment
When I was 9 or 10 years old, my class was herded into some Earth Day type event in the shore town where I grew up in New Jersey. I remember a lecturer telling me and other kids that the oceans rise up and engulf half our town within 25 years.
The reason? Global warming.
It's been almost 25 years, and my town hasn't washed away. And other than the insane political polarization that has come to just about any issue in America (more on this later), I think the doomsday scenarios are what keep people from talking about global warming.
After all, scientists and futurists have been wrong. We thought we'd start running out of oil by the 1990s. We thought we'd all have flying cars by now.
So when we went about writing this week's climate change cover story, 'Scorched Earth,' we didn't look to big, glib doomsday scenarios. Instead, we looked for how global warming is actually projected to change the Inland Northwest. And from agriculture to wildfire, there's a ton of research on how the warming planet will affect us not just in 50 years, but by 2020.
But that doesn't explain why we decided write about global warming. We did that (and ironically, it was Bill McKibben's doomsday extraordinaire piece in Rolling Stone that sparked the thought) because with all the unemployment and economic despair, talking about the environment has fallen off the national discussion list.
We've got a big election coming up, and we've got people running for governor, congress and president who should be talking about global warming along with all the other issues. But they're not. So please, feel free to take your copy of The Inlander and bug the hell out of them.
P.S. I'll be on The Inlander's Facebook page Friday at noon PST to discuss the story. Drop by and hit us up with any comments, criticisms or thoughts you might have.
For example, in his Rolling Stone article, he claims: "So far, WE´VE raised the average temperature of the planet just under 0.8 degrees Celsius" [emphasis mine]. This comment isn´t even disingenuous; it is simply false. THE temperature has risen 0.8 degrees. WE might have contributed a little to it, but WE didn´t do it. It is still generally accepted that the majority of the rise has been due to natural causes. This gradual shift to the idea that we are responsible for the majority of warming does not have science behind it.
The hypothetical figures given in the beginning of YOUR article -- 3 to 8 degrees by 2050 -- are also not supported by the science. That much warming was not predicted even by the alarmist IPCC, which predicted more like 2 degrees C (4.5 degrees F) by 2100!
When confronted with such blatant BS in just the first few paragraphs, it was kind of hard for me to keep reading. But I did.
Henning´s statement that the sun has been "discarded" as a possible cause is also... I´ll say "disingenuous" because I want to be polite. Total solar irradiance is difficult to measure at the best of times, and its fluctuations before less than about 20 years ago were never directly measured. Estimates of past irradiance based on other factors are fraught with error because, as I say, even with our modern instruments measurement of the differences is difficult. Estimations of the past via proxies have probable error ranges so wide that any possible signal is pretty much lost in the noise.
Further, total solar irradiance is not the only way that the sun affects climate. Magnetic storms and other effects (like the "filament" that came our way just the other day) can have significant and cumulative effect. Again: these things were not directly measured in the past because we did not know how. Further, the only real proxy we have for estimating the past values of any of those things are intermittent and sometimes inconsistent records of sunspots. Hardly adequate.
The sun is also just now coming off of the maximum of its 11-year cycle, ending the current period of "solar grand maximum", which means that longer-term cycles, as well as the 11-year cycle, all coincided at the same time. Past records show that temperature changes lagged the actual sun cycles by a couple of years, give or take. So it should be no surprise that we are having an unusually hot summer. The fact that the sun has slowed down over the last couple of years, often cited by the climate alarmists, is not very relevant to today´s weather.
In your "History of Misinformation" section, the very first sentence is grossly misleading, and might be called misinformation itself:
"By the mid-1990s, politicians began to act on the consensus that global warming was real and human-made."
You left a few words out there. It should have said "and that humans were likely to be PART of the cause." Even if some scientists today think that humans are the major cause, most still don´t and back then just about nobody did.
I could go on, but I´m not going to bother. This is a piece of junk masquerading as science reporting. It is woefully one-sided, and seems to reflect a popular (but very much incorrect) view that there is only one "side" to present.
Sep 13, 2012 | Reply to this comment