re: #311 Shane

Re: Charles 299#

No problem there. It bothers me that they support it. Absolutely understand that the posts will continue. It bothers me anytime our politicians use puesdo science to press their beleifs. You are absolutely right about main stream politicians supporting creationism is messed up. I don’t know how most of your people feel about creationism, but I’m an atheist. I really don’t beleive in it. Worse, I actually went ahead and read the bible and it clearly says you will have no proof other than your faith. So why would a religous person attempt to prove the bible is true when it is telling you that it can’t be done? My guess, they lack faith in the god they beleive in and are hoping they aren’t buying the proverbial “fire insurance”.

I’m just saying I skip those posts. It pains me to see people support that crap and wonder why no one takes them seriously. Especially if I voted for one of them.

As far as climate change being bunk, I would say I agree the climate is changing. I would disagree that CO2 is causing it. I am more inclined to beleive its that big fireball in the sky, coupled with changes in axis on our whirling globe.

Take a look at the video Charles posted at 306. That doesn’t flat settle it; perhaps the temperature increase from the graph is an artifact of how temperatures are measured. What about urban heat island effects and so on?

To test that hypothesis is no trivial matter. There are some weather stations that have been in the same place all along, and it’s been rural all along. But what if a tree fell and the station got more sun? What you need is data that don’t depend on thermometers or weather stations.

Time series photographs of alpine glaciers will do. Records of when arctic rivers froze over in winter and broke up in spring will be useful. Dates at which migratory birds and butterflies showed up in their summer or winter habitats can help.

And the fact is, every one of these types of data confirm the hypothesis that nowadays the climate really is warmer than it was in the early 1900s. This, too, doesn’t settle the issue. Perhaps there is another reason at work. What if there are long-term cycles in the weather, and it’s just been sunnier by day and cloudier by night? What if industrial pollution is causing clouds to form more often at night? That would be a man-made warming, but one that could easily be reversed just by regulating particulate emissions.

Nobody has come up with any explanation along these lines that holds up under close scrutiny, but perhaps there is an explanation nobody’s thought of yet. That’s a thin reed. More likely, the obvious explanation is the correct one. CO2 really is a greenhouse gas. We really do have more of it up there than we used to have. The physics of absorption lines predicts, all else being equal and simplifying so you can run the numbers, a warming in the general vicinity of what we’re seeing. That’s not enough to convict CO2 as the perp, but it’s enough to issue a search warrant. Scientifically, it’s enough to make “anthropogenic global warming” a plausible hypothesis. It could well be true.