I’ve been seeing the climate change issue here and there again recently. Unfortunately, it’s the same banter from both sides over and over again. I’m, personally, very tired of reading the same stuff. There’s the climate change fan-boys that are totally convinced that man is causing the climate to shift, simply because a group of scientists said so. Also, there’s the people that deny that it exists, saying that man couldn’t possibly affect the global climate in such a way. Honestly, there’s merit to both statements.
From the climate change supporters perspective, it’s easy to simply look to an “expert” in a given field and make up one’s mind based on that person’s opinion. If I were to go with that approach, I’d never have to do any real investigation into the evidence itself; I could read someone’s summary and spend the extra time playing Team Fortress 2. Sounds good to me. But I really do enjoy analyzing statistical data. It’s fun, and I get to verify/discount suppositions without having to depend on the word of someone else (of whom I’ve probably never met nor ever will meet).
From the perspective of the climate change opposition, it’s also easy to look at the size and complexity of our world and conclude that we 6+ billion people cover only a small percentage of this planet’s surface, and therefore could hardly make that large an impact on it’s operation. However, the recent oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico is one example of how humans can indeed have an impact on relatively large portions of the globe. So, empirical evidence tends to toss this idea out the window rather quickly.
I’m trying to be fair to both sides of this debate, but notice I haven’t addressed the “experts” on either side, since 99.9% of the debating that I’ve seen is done by people with little or no experience in either climate science or even scientific research in general. I count myself in this category, so I’m not knocking the common man by any means. I have my own opinions, which I’ll no doubt be expanding on below, but I wanted to show that both sides have strengths and weaknesses to their own most-bantered arguments.
Now, on to my own thoughts on the issue:
Climate change is happening; there, I said it. But this statement shouldn’t be a shock to anyone. The Earth’s climate hasn’t stopped changing from the beginning of time. The real questions are:
- Is the climate change we’re seeing today unusual, given our past observations?
- How many years have we been collecting climate data in a consistent format?
- Where is the raw data?
- What steps were taken to analyze the data to reach your conclusion?
As you can see, the most important of these questions is the third on the list above. I still have yet to see honest-to-goodness raw data and a methodology for examining that data to reach a conclusion of unusual climate change. In addition, the “dummy” graphs I’ve seen in articles promoting the concept of man-made global warming, for example, show that we’ve been collecting climate data for only 300 years or so. If the world is as large as many scientists say it is (in the billions of years; though I don’t hold to this idea myself), observing climate changes for this length of time is a terribly small sample size in the Earth’s total climate-changing life.
There is, also, this large ball of fire in the sky that keeps this world heated; you may have heard of it: the sun. Apparently, the amount of energy it casts toward the earth doesn’t always remain constant. Sometimes, it has what the experts call “solar flares” which cast large bursts of heat/energy into space. One would expect that when the amount of energy being output from the sun increases, the temperature of the earth might rise with it in some reasonable correlation. So, given this thought, it seems possible that even if there is something unusual about the climate patterns in the last hundred years, there might be other causes for it than man kind. I’d like to see charts comparing some other variables:
- Chart comparing atmospheric CO2 levels and global population levels (more humans means more breathing)
- Chart comparing temperature and solar flare activity (and not just number of flares, but also energy output as a result of the flares, since different flares have different intensities)
One other thought that’s been floating around in my somewhat-empty head is whether temperature readings on the moon might be helpful here as well. Since I suggested that solar flare activity could be a culprit, if we accepted that we do indeed have unusual climate activity on the earth, one might expect that the Moon’s climate might change also (though on a much different scale, since it has much less atmosphere than the Earth).
So, that’s about it. The primary reason I have chosen to reject the climate change position is that I haven’t seen any real data. All I’ve seen are simple charts (e.g., the “hockey stick”), that could mean just about anything given the proper numeric massaging (see Political Math Blog for ways you can manipulate numbers to say anything you want).
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