William Reardon’s Blog

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. :-)

This entry was posted on Sunday, July 9th, 2006 at 2:20 pm and is filed under non-sequitur. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.