“Was It Something I Said?”
Friday, July 28th, 2006Apparently someone else has figured out PHP sucks too.
Archive for July, 2006
A Skeptical Look at Global Warming: Part II: After the Movie
Tuesday, July 18th, 2006Well, the movie wasn’t what I expected. I think I was hasher on it initially because of that. What I had expected was a scientific documentary, perhaps something like an episode of Nova, considering the case for global warming.
Walking out the theatre in that mindset, I had a general sense of disappointment. There was wide mix of evidence offered. Some I really liked, including how the movie starts off showing a graph of CO2 levels & temperatures for the last 650,000 years. But it also dips into anecdotal — nobody remembers polar bears drowning before. Remembers? And I’m still not sure how global warning caused ebola?
However, if you dismiss how the movie is marketed, take a step back, and think about what the movie is and the motivations for creating it — i.e., an attempt to rebuild Gore’s political career and rally like minded people to a cause it makes sense & a lot of my criticisms fade away.
In fact, to that end it does a good job. Al Gore certainly comes across better than he did in his prior political runs. We learn about how he was a simple farmboy, we see pictures of him w/ his first cow, the bitter irony of growing tobacco that would later claims his mom’s life, how the loss of the 2000 election hurt him, but from where he decided to give his slide show again. I could see a lot of people on the left walking out of the movie really liking Al Gore.
Still, I have three major complaints: his heavy usage of emotional transference, the vilification of those with dissenting views, and his coverage of solutions.
If you watch, you see a lot of pleasant images & sounds accompanied or followed by positive assertions and negative imagines mixed in or followed by causes of global warming or those who disagree. E.g., see the evil tobacco lobby? Remember how we hate them? Now project those feelings onto those against global warming. The feeling you get of standing on a riverbank & looking at lush green trees? Associate that with Al Gore.
This also fits with the vilification of those unconvinced of global warming. Again, I personally believe it happens, but it’s a far cry from being absolute certain and there’s still the open question of what it means. In general, challenges to an idea are good. If it either strengthens the theory (if it’s true) or it helps us understand where we might have gotten things wrong. It furthers our understanding.
Painting doubt & debate as evil is distasteful. I’m not particularly found of when religions do it, so I’m not going to embrace it here either. It taints the conversation & debate. Put another way, what would you make of someone painting the dissenters in the asteroid/dinosaur debate as evil?
Past the various montages of Al Gore’s life, my interested piqued again at the end of the film, as he starts to discuss solutions. However, much like a Little Jon “What!”, it doesn’t really go anywhere. In just a few seconds, a few solutions are mentioned with a percent, and told that if we add them up, we’ve solved the problem by getting back to 1970s level & that’s about it. No discussion about them or their impacts. How feasible is each? What’s the economic impact? How could they be realistically implemented? None of that’s discussed. The whole bit is probably less than a minute — he spent more time talking about the 2000 election than that!
(And does getting to the 1970s really solve the problem? That seems to be the implication, but if I recall correctly, even by 1970 CO2 levels where way too high?)
So all in all, was it a good film? It depends. If it was to rebuild Al Gore’s image, then yes. If it was to further the cause of global warming, then no. The science in was surprisingly lacking. I remember recently an AP article where several climatologist said the science was accurate, but then it would be like saying the science in Twister or Star Trek was accurate too. There just isn’t much in any.
Given the test “would it change anyone’s mind on global warming after seeing it?”, I’d answer probably not. It didn’t really change mine . Some people clapped at the end and one guy yelled “fuck yeah!”, but I’d be surprised if they didn’t already have a strong belief in global warming.
In a lot of ways, it would be like watching a highlight film of the Chicago Bears — I’d walk out having seen proof that they’re the greatest team on the planet, and think you’re an idiot if you didn’t draw the same conclusion for not having seen the same thing. (Which you are if you’re a Packer’s fan.)
So, at the end of the movie I’m still left where I started, with a lukewarm belief in an idea and not much supporting evidence that I personally know of & have strong faith in. At the very least, I’m motivated to learn more. If attributable to the movie, that’s certainly a positive.
For next steps, I think I’m going to try to find more information about a few things. First, the ice core samples & past cycles of the earth cooling warming. That data seemed interesting & it’s really the only thing that seems to have an adequate data set to make anything logical out of.
Second, falsible hypotheses. That is, theories that can cut either way — showing global warming does & doesn’t occur. E.g., you can’t point the record high temperatures as evidence of global warming if you refuse to go the other way should they not occur. Third, I’m curious about climinatology as a whole. Al Gore mentioned the sample of peer-reviewed articles — I’d be curious the accuracy of forecasts & predictions.
Again, what I find I’ll try to post.
A Skeptical Look at Global Warming
Sunday, July 9th, 2006Despite living in California, I only have a basic, mainstream understanding of global warming. My knowledge is more or less limited to what I learned in high school earth science, casual conversations with friends (generally those of the green persuasian), and what I’ve read in the newspapers, magazines, etc.
A few people I know (both locally & in the blogsphere), have mentioned they really liked Al Gore’s An Inconvient Truth, and thought it did a great job explaining global warming & the dangers it presented.
I thought it would be an interesting excerise to write down my thoughts & opinions prior to seeing the film, and then seeing how, if at all, they changed afterwards.
So, before seeing it, here are my biases. Note that some of these could be (and probably are) wrong. Again, they’re not really backed by fact — they’re more or less vague impressions at best.
His 1988 run for the presidential nomination (against Jesse Jackson) showed he’s something of racist, he’s not very charismatic, and people around him have describe him as not very intelligent. In short, he seems to be the Democratic response to George Bush.
Harboring a mild dislike of Bush, I’m not inclined to like Gore much either.
Still, that doesn’t mean whatever Gore says is automatically wrong. As Robert Pirsig said, “Just because a fool says it’s raining outside, doesn’t mean that it isn’t”, so I’ll try to keep an open mind to what is being said and less who is saying it.
Obviously, it wouldn’t surprise me if a Exxon sponsored a study that showed global warming wasn’t happening. Same for car manufactures, coal mines, or any other enterprise which currently profits and in some way contributes to pumping CO2 into the atmosphere.
But that doesn’t mean that they’re alone. If Ralph Nader came out with a study showing global warming is happening, I wouldn’t be surprised either, as he’s not going to get elected if people think it’s not a big deal.
Likewse, if you hate Bush, Republicans, Big Business, Capitalism, the American Way of life, and you believe global warming runs counter to any of them, there’s incentive to find yourself supporting global warming.
There’s two other additional motivations that aren’t tied to personal gain: 1) There’s something in people that tends to attract them to the idea they’re living in the end times. It doesn’t matter if it’s people reading Left Behind, screaming we’ll all going to die in a nuclear holocaust, a Branch Davidian, or we’re going to die of global warming. Some people are attracted to the ideas regardless of the evidence behind them.
2) People like to feel they’re part of an elite group. What defines the creed of that elite group can vary — it could be a belief in God (a la those trying to ban gay marriage or flying planes into buildings), it could be a belief in a race (a la the Nazis), or it could be how you treat the environment (a la Greenpeace & Ralph Nader).
One thing I like about science over politics, is that while politics attempts to hide facts that don’t support an idea, science dictates that they be brought forward. It isn’t uncommon to hear about evidence that doesn’t support a prevailing theory. You readily hear from most scientists about how there is a inherent contradiction between quantum mechanics & the theory of relativity. When Andrew Wiles’ first iteration of his proof of Fermat’s Last Theorm was found to contain a flaw, Wiles didn’t simply dismiss them as someone who didn’t want to believe in the theorem. However, this does seem to happen with global warming.
To hear those advocating its existence, the science behind global warming has long been overwhelming and proven without a shadow of the doubt.
In the Economist a few months back, an article ran where one of the final global warming pieces of the puzzle had fallen into place. In a nutshell, since the 70s, data from weather balloons & satellites have indicated that the temperature of the troposphere has been stable. This was particularly confusing to climatologists, as global warming theory would indicate its temperature should increase in conjunction with the Earth’s surface temperature, but that was not the case.
The final piece of the puzzle was how this could be, but the first question in my head was why is this the first time it’s being mentioned. A fair & open discussion about a theory is going to include evidence in support and against it, yet this was hardly mentioned until it could be dismissed and, even with the hole, the theory had been called rock solid.
Most of what I’ve read seems to look at a very, very narrow time period compared to the age of the earth. It also seems to ignore or not address how it fits in with other periods of cooling & warming the Earth has gone through in the past, both with man & without.
This could, however, simply be a limitation of what I’ve been exposed to. I had dinner with a friend bit back, just after he had finished his first year of grad school in atmospheric sciences. He mentioned some interesting facts on how they could look at historical temperature and carbon levels with ice cores (and showed an exponential upswing in the CO2 levels in the last 50 years or so), but didn’t know much as to any environmental theory behind temperature swings on the order of the ice ages. Again, it doesn’t mean it’s not there, just I’m not aware of it.
In a letter to the editor of my alumni magazine, a group biologist responded to an article about Intelligent Design, declaring it couldn’t be called science because it lacked several aspects of traditional established scientific practices, notably repeatability. That is, there is no experiment you could give asserting intelligent design that someone else could do to assert the theory is correct.
Weather is an incredibly complex, chaotic system. (Think of this, with all our technology, we can’t say for certain if it’s going to rain even a month from today or not.) It seems very challenging, if not impossible, to put forth a theory on global warming that others would be able to independently execute and validate. After all, we’ve only got one Earth.
Others may think this will skew thing a great deal, but I doubt much, if any, impact. After all, Teddy Roosevelt was both a conservative and a conservationist.
Despite all that, however, probably my biggest bias is:
I lean towards thinking global warming is happening & it’s due to pollution from mankind. Asked to prove it, or convince someone else, I doubt I could. My reasons are shaky at best.
So why am I leaning that way? A few reasons, none of them terribly scientific:
- Most people I know seem to believe it.
- It jives up with what I learned in high school & greenhouse gases.
- People I know personally, respect & who are better educated on the matter, believe it. That really boils down to a handful of people: the previously mentioned buddy in grad school, and Brandon, or more directly, Brandon’s dad, who’s worked with the environment for the federal government his whole life.
And with that, I’m off to see the movie. I’ll post my impressions afterwards, in the mean time, if you have any links that you think would be good to read afters — either for or against global warming — feel free to post them below. I’ll try to read whatever people send my way & post my impression. (Brandon’s already given me a half dozen or so. :-)
Dodging Natural Selection Yet Again
Thursday, July 6th, 2006Note to self: do not yawn again with a small lego in your mouth.
Enuf is enuf but enough is too much
Wednesday, July 5th, 2006Truth, Justice, and the American Way
Sunday, July 2nd, 2006Their Superman:
My Superman:
“Able to blow out candles in a single breath!” I have vauge memories about seeing the first two Superman movies as kid. If you didn’t know me when I was 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, or, more to the point, didn’t attend any of my birthday parties, you might not know that I loved Superman. Not only was birthday cake Superman every year, but so too was my Halloween costume. My bed was covered with Superman sheets & Superman posters hung on my wall. Apparently, I once I even made a cape out of a pillow case & wanted to jump out of my 2nd story window thinking I could fly like Superman. Watching Superman Returns, I have to say there where moments where I could feel the eight year old boy in me still jumping with glee. This movie is fantanstic. A++ Brandon Routh is a worth successor to the Superman role & pulled it off magnificently. Derek is right. Go see this movie. Now.
Although I’ll leave it to you to decide which Superman is cuter. |
Google Loves Me!
Saturday, July 1st, 2006Okay, not really me, maybe more Bill Waterson.
The other day Jimmy noticed that if you go to Google Homepage Content Directory (where you can do a My Yahoo type thing), the 9th item listed is my Calvin & Hobbes RSS feed.
Sweet!
Sadly, it doesn’t look like Google reports their subscriber counts back to publisher (like everyone else does), so I don’t really know many people are reading it there. Still, it got me curious. Since I use Bloglines, I see my C&H subscriber count for those users just about daily (currently at 353), but I never really checked how many total subscribers there are. Some greps and pipes later, counting only web based aggregators, it looks like there are 971 people who read it.
Damn, I never would have guessed that many.
Still, it’s pretty cool knowing some simple Perl scripting brings a little smile into that many people’s day.
