After spending the weekend retrieving Son of SWNID from the wilds of western Massachusetts and driving through unseasonably cold, hard rain for much of the trip, we find ourselves cold to the hypothesis of a global warming crisis.
So we are glad to see National Review Online supplying a nifty article by Jason Lee Steorts on the problematic assertions of Time magazine, among others, that the polar glaciers are melting. Steorts offers evidence to the contrary: the melting is confined to small areas, while much larger areas are accumulating additional ice.
If there's anything that we learned from our too-brief two semesters of geology for non-geologists and our further reading on the subject, it is that our Favored Planet for its entire history and prehistory has been altering, renewing and developing itself. Small wonder that legions of scientists observing it closely notice changes.
We stipulate that the planet has been getting slightly warmer in recent years, and even that humans' release of carbon into the atmosphere has something to do with it. But we have grave difficulty seeing such a matter as a crisis.
11 comments:
The earth has an atmosphere. Ever wonder why our oxygen doesn't float off into space? The atmosphere functions like a "window" in a greenhouse to deliver a similar effect.
I just learned that a final authority on the subject has finally come out: Al Gore is releasing a new film on the effect of global warming on earth's environment. In trying to find a narrator who could could capture the passionate personality of not only the filmaker but that of the film itself, Gore made a visit to the home of Ben Stein to petition for his help. However when asked Stein only replied, "Take off your sandals, for you are standing on holy ground."
Now Fiona, no need to be caddish. The Greenhouse effect and Global Warming theory are two different things. The Greenhouse Effect is a scientific law that observes that certain atmospheric gasses absorbes the infared energy that radiates from the earth ratehr than allowing it to pass into "bitter cold space." Among these gasses are water vapor which accounts for 60% of all absorbed radiation, carbon dioxide 26% and methane, nitrous oxide and ozone which each account for 8%. What determines which wave lengths of light are absorbed by a particular gas are quantum mechanics which basically is an observation of how the laws of physics change at sub atomic levels. All of this is fact, not theory. The Greenhouse Effect has been around since the mid 19th century. Now then, the relation of the Greenhouse Effect to the theory of global warming is that if significantly larger ammounts of carbon dioxide are released into the atmosphere, a proportionally increased ammount of heat will be stored by the atmosphere rather than released. I think the global warming overestimates the effect of additional carbon dioxide to the make-up of the atmosphere and thus to the claim that the earth would be significantly warmer. The truth is, the greenhouse effect is what makes life on earth bearable. If greenhouse gases did not absorb infared light radiating from the earth, our planet would be an average 60 degrees cooler on the Farenheit scale. So effectively the properties of glass and greenhouse gasses when related to atmospheric temperatures is the same. Obviously they have different physical properties, however they produce the same effect. To say the earth exhibits a greenhouse effect does not mean the earth is a greenhouse, rather it appropriates the imagery of a greenhouse to explain a principle that is otherwise difficultly described.
Don't forget the cow flatulence in the greenhouse equation. All that methane just so we can eat Big Macs!
Nice work, Bryan D.
Now, if you two want to continue this discussion, why don't you IM? It's more efficient.
more efficient, SWNID, but much less entertaining for the rest of us!
please, fiona, continue!
Um, a scientific observation/generalization/law stated as an analogy is no less valid for the analogy. Without analogies, there is no way to use language to express any new idea.
Statements of generalizations aren't proof indeed. But the failure to state all the proof with every statement of the generalization is hardly culpable, and it certainly doesn't invalidate the generalization.
If some remain skeptical about the notion that CO2 absorbs energy from the infrared portion of the spectrum more readily than do some other gases, we urge them to be very careful about asserting the absence of evidence without careful reviews of the scientific literature, a responsibilty we are not prepared to shoulder by proxy.
And if the alternative is to believe that a massive conspiracy to cook up (analogy alert!) a bogus hypothesis for ideological ends has overtaken the climatological community, we urge that such notions be confined to stories about the Holy Grail or UFOs.
The apparatus for the experiment would be obvious to any one who has taken an advanced high school or entry level college chemistry class.
The thing to fill a test tube or chamber with a particular gas and on one end of the tube/chamber places a filter that splits light along its spectrum. With greenhouse gasses infared light is not visible on the other side. This is because greenhouse gasses absord in fared light. You would notice that if you exposed the gas to infared light only, nothing would come out on the other side.
If you want to learn why particular material gasses absord certain light ranges and not others, I point you again towards Quantum Mechanics, which I am afraid I don't have the capacity to teach you over this blog, nor do I suspect you would like to learn.
Furthermore, Fiona, the conservative cause would be better served if you sat down and took a deep breath. I am not now, nor have ever been, anywhere near the platform of Greenpeace, the Green Party, or any other enviromentalist cause. If you knew me, and you do not, and you heard someone else accuseing me affiliation with GreenPeace you would find this very amusing.
However, disputing the greenhouse effect is like disputing gravity. Who is regurgitating here? In your fervor you have demonstrated how absolutely unprepared you are to dialogue on the subject. Who are the more ignorant ones on the issue? The enviromentalists who overestimate the effect on CO2 fluctuations in the atmosphere or the dittoheads who reject every bit of scientific evidence or principle related to global warming?
Furthermore, the "discoverers" of the greenhouse effect were Joseph Fourier and Svante Arrhenius winner of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Of course many scientists since, but all of them failed with the exception of a few who were in fact able to qualify these men's theories. One of these notables is Knut Angstrom who successfully refuted one of Arrhenius' claims that CO2 levels were responsible for the Ice Ages.
It took me a long time to learn it, but I have learned that nothing good comes from being contrary for the sake of doing so. If anything it limits one's ability to argue with dexterity but it also avoids true ddeconstruction which relates only to statements/characterizations/arguments that rely on their opposites to gain any meaning.
The less demented members of this preterite flock will find better grazing at :
www.realclimate.org/
Um, Fiona, you continue to tar people with a pretty broad brush, and to assign guilt by association. And to miss the point.
The verb "stipulate" means "assume true for the sake of argument." Consider how the use of that verb in the original post affects the nature of your objections. Consider also how your objections to Bryan D have to do with things that he didn't say.
You've now posted something that is virtually indistinguishable, minus the rhetoric and some residual logical errors, from the point where this whole discussion began.
We understand that few people read blogs carefully. But we urge a little more care. Otherwise we may have to send all you children to separate rooms.
Dearest anonymous, we are lost by your application of an obscure grammatical term to modify the noun "flock." "Past-tense flock"? The force of the metaphor escapes us. Please enlighten! We are intrigued.
The issue of global warming is so shot through with politics and (in the scientific community) social pressure as to make it very difficult for laypeople, among whom as a divinity scholar we count ourselves, to sort matters out. This recommends, at least, skepticism about all sides and a lack of general hysteria. The sky seldom falls, per the famous story.
On Al Gore's film, we recommend the piece on All Things Considered on 5-24. It balances gentle stipulation of limited scientific data with grand skepticism about alarmist conclusions. Worst case: change will come so slowly that folks will adapt readily, as our kind has historically. We may post on this later.
Fiona, thanks again for making explicit what has been implicit in the entire discussion. You've got a bright future writing Cliffs Notes.
I know you are but what am I?????
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