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Re: Human vs. natural influences on the environment



Dan Evens <dan.evens@hydro.on.ca> wrote:
>UHG! I can recommend NOT trusting any of these.

Fine.  What do YOU suggest people trust?  I know that SciAm for some
years was heavily pro-nuclear, and I factored that into my skepticism.
Reading several publications is one way to learn their biases.

One caveat:  Don't read anything by Lyndon LaRouche, except for laughs.

>Sample: Sci. Am. published,
>several times over the last couple years, a graph purporting to show the
>rise in average global temp. over the last century. What they published
>was a nice straight line with no error bars, and a rise of something like
>1 degree C. They never mention that the year-to-year variation is vastly
>larger than this 1 degree jump,

Over a century, what is the point in not doing e.g. a 10-year moving
average?  And what would be the point of leaving in effects of phenomena
like the El Nino Southern Oscillation and the sunspot cycle, when
discussing the overall climate?

>Nor was there ANY kind of ref, not even to previous Sci. Am. volumes,
>about where this graph came from. There was not even an author's name.

If that's the case, then how do you know...

>that this curve is some kind of fit
>based on climate models that are stupidly poor fits.

You would appear to be contradicting yourself.

> Nor do they mention
>anywhere that I could ever find that the primary greenhouse gas is water
>vapour, and nobody really knows what has happened to it over the last
>century.

The amount of water vapor the atmosphere will hold is a function of the
temperature, and the effect of other greenhouse gases on water vapor levels
is likely to be to increase them.

>And the usual argument is roughly at the level of "oh we don't really know
>anything for sure, so we better do things my way."

I find the argument that "We don't really understand everything yet, so we
might as well keep increasing the level of our forcing function on a system
which may have positive feedback loops and no limits" to be very unsettling.
Is ignorance of an approaching cliff really bliss?

>UHG!

I have the same sort of reaction to people (like Nudds) whose demand is
that we scrap everything except solar and wind as rapidly as possible.
We should be prudent, certainly, but that includes not recklessly
abandoning technologies.


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