Well, his logic and arguments seem pretty well-reasoned, overall, but I'm still shading a little more toward global warming, personally. One thing I don't like about his article is (in the references .pdf) he uses a graph extrapolated from data in a Nature article[1] (picture here), to say that "changes in temperature would be seen to precede changes in CO2 concentration by 400 to 4,000 years." However, the authors of the Nature article give a +/- of 15000 years on the time scale for the graphs in question (because they're extrapolated scales), so you can't make those sorts of conclusions. There's definitely correlation between the CO2 concentration and the temperature, but the data aren't precise enough to identify causation one way or the other. (I think he makes a little too much of the lack of a scientific consensus, also, since for most scientific theories, consensus is only arrived at after the theory's been around for a generation and not been knocked over. That's a direct response/rebuttal to the UN claim, though, so it's not as big a deal to me.)
My thing with global warming is the minor fact that ~70% of the planet is covered in water, which is still the magic molecule. It's an acid, it's a base, it absorbs heat, it moves heat, it dissipates heat, it's a buffer, it's a catalyst...in short, it's fucking amazing stuff, and it's more prevalent than stupid people in evangelical churches.
I think that the Earth is capable of fixing the global warming trend on its own, given time. (See also, ozone hole, now predicted to close back up by ~2050.) The problem is that we (as a species) are not giving it the time, and are continually producing *more* CO2, so if there *is* a causal connection between them, we are making the problem worse. (From the same Nature article, in the abstract, the authors state "Present-day atmospheric burdens of [CH4 and CO2] seem to have been unprecedented during the past 420,000 years." Anyone who believes we aren't the cause of that is a little shortsighted.)
I don't think we should be alarmist about the situation, but I think we should make the effort to curb the CO2 and CH4 emissions. Maybe not to the levels of the Kyoto protocol, but we shouldn't continue letting the emissions increase unchecked. If only more people could be convinced that a) wind power is a viable alternative and not an eyesore, and that b) nuclear power is actually safe, and about the least polluting form we can use (for mass production), when proper safety measures are taken into account. (While I'm at it, I'd like a million dollars, and a pony.)
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Date: 2006-11-07 07:53 pm (UTC)My thing with global warming is the minor fact that ~70% of the planet is covered in water, which is still the magic molecule. It's an acid, it's a base, it absorbs heat, it moves heat, it dissipates heat, it's a buffer, it's a catalyst...in short, it's fucking amazing stuff, and it's more prevalent than stupid people in evangelical churches.
I think that the Earth is capable of fixing the global warming trend on its own, given time. (See also, ozone hole, now predicted to close back up by ~2050.) The problem is that we (as a species) are not giving it the time, and are continually producing *more* CO2, so if there *is* a causal connection between them, we are making the problem worse. (From the same Nature article, in the abstract, the authors state "Present-day atmospheric burdens of [CH4 and CO2] seem to have been unprecedented during the past 420,000 years." Anyone who believes we aren't the cause of that is a little shortsighted.)
I don't think we should be alarmist about the situation, but I think we should make the effort to curb the CO2 and CH4 emissions. Maybe not to the levels of the Kyoto protocol, but we shouldn't continue letting the emissions increase unchecked. If only more people could be convinced that a) wind power is a viable alternative and not an eyesore, and that b) nuclear power is actually safe, and about the least polluting form we can use (for mass production), when proper safety measures are taken into account. (While I'm at it, I'd like a million dollars, and a pony.)
[1]Nature, volume 399, pp 429-436 (1999).