Bob Whitmire wrote:
> Y'know, the politics of climate notwithstanding,
Something I've found from spending over six decades paying modest
attention is that there are certain repeating patterns that seem pretty
reliable. One I've noticed is that any theory that starts to become
politically successful, gathers a large number of true believing
adherents, primarily based on how it aligns with their political and/or
religio-spiritual agendas, and moves into general public acceptance, is
almost bound to turn out to be somewhere between over-simplistic and
just plain wrong.
I was wondering about the global cooling theories starting a few years
ago, when the term started to become a catch phrase. I found at least
one serious scientist, an emeritus professor of astronomy in the UK, who
was worrying about something else entirely. His life-long field of study
was solar activity cycles. What with all the relatively recently
available data on long term temperatures and solar radiation, he had
found a very strong correlation between sun spot activity and
temperatures on Earth.
His concern was that, if past solar activity behavior was indicative of
future behavior, it looked a lot like we might be heading into a period
of global cooling. He admitted no expertise on global warming from other
factors, but thought if it were true about human created greenhouse gas
caused warming, there was a possibility it might save our ass/arses from
freezing off in the not distant future. A fair number of other
scientific folks tend to agree with him about the distinct possibility
of a period of global cooling from changes in solar radiation.
The non-thinking believers pounce on any source of greenhouse gases, and
would like to attack air travel. However, measurements during the days
after 9/11 in the central US showed a significant increase in surface
temperatures. It appears that the ice crystals created in the atmosphere
by jet traffic create enough increase in Earth's albedo to reflect
enough additional solar radiation to lower global temps. How might that
balance their CO2 output, I have no idea.
Now comes the latest data on global temperatures for 2008:
<http://www.dailytech.com/Temperature+Monitors+Report+Widescale+Global+Cooling/article10866.htm>
"All four major global temperature tracking outlets (Hadley,
NASA's GISS, UAH, RSS) have released updated data. All show that over
the past year, global temperatures have dropped precipitously.
A compiled list of all the sources can be seen here. The total amount
of cooling ranges from 0.65C up to 0.75C -- a value large enough to wipe
out most of the warming recorded over the past 100 years. All in one
year's time. For all four sources, it's the single fastest temperature
change ever recorded, either up or down."
I'm not coming down on any simple side. My guess is that global
temperatures are a result of many systemic processes pulling in various
directions, only some of which we are aware of and even fewer of which
we come close to understanding.
At a far more simplistic level, I recall the hoorah about DDT. My father
was a pesticide researcher. When proposals came up to ban DDT, he
generally agreed that was a good idea, based on his very expert
knowledge. He though there were a few very limited, specialized uses
that should continue, but knew that was politically impossible.
However, he was sure that much of the "scientific evidence" for
environmental damage from DDT/DDE was in fact, caused by something else.
He told me the rapid proliferation of inexpensive gas chromatographs in
the hands of biologists with insufficient training and expertise in
organic chemistry was leading to a lot of wrong results.
He asked if I had ever heard of polychlorinated biphenyls, PCBs - nope.
He told me about them, what they were used for and why they were a major
environmental poison. He quite accurately predicted that they would soon
pop up in the news and require major changes in many products and
extensive environmental clean-up. His experience was that sloppy
technique could lead to PCBs being misanalysed as DDE, the major
breakdown product of DDT, and the major environmental contaminant from it.
Lots of stuff ain't simple, no matter how much we would like it to be.
A. Pensive Moose
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