RE: [Paddlewise] Thank you global warming

Good responses from several Paddlewisers. I'd like to add just this:

There are two anti-GW myths about global cooling. One is that a consensus of
climatologists in the 1970s predicted global cooling. This is trotted out, I
guess (George Will devoted nearly a third of a column to it early this
year), to imply that you can't trust a science that changes its conclusions
every 30 years or so. It's another ad hominem argument like the one Mike
Euritt presented us about climatologists going along to get along. At best,
this myth is based on a survey of news reports in the popular media of the
era; at worst, it is based on cherry-picking those news reports. 

It does not appear to be based on the scientific literature. Last year the
Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society published the results of a
survey of all the peer-reviewed papers from 1965 through 1979 they could
find that dealt with climate in the next 100 years. Of those, 7 predicted
global cooling, 20 were neutral, and 44 predicted global warming -- hardly a
consensus for global cooling! You can download a pdf of the BAMS paper here:

http://ams.allenpress.com/archive/1520-0477/89/9/pdf/i1520-0477-89-9-1325.pd
f

The other myth is that the earth has been cooling over the last ten years.
It is obvious from looking at a graph of global temperatures that the rate
of increase has decreased. It is not so obvious whether the trend is
negative or positive without a statistical analysis. So AP reporter Seth
Borenstein sent the warming data to four different statisticians and asked
them to look for trends without telling them what the data represented. All
four said there has been an upward trend during the 2000s:

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20091026/ap_on_sc/us_sci_global_cooling

Enough said.

Chuck Holst
recovering at home from kidney surgery


 

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