extropians: RE: Science: Global Warming...

RE: Science: Global Warming...

Billy Brown (bbrown@conemsco.com)
Mon, 8 Mar 1999 08:58:23 -0600

EvMick@aol.com wrote:
> I come across this in my email...does anyone have any comments?
>
> **************************************************************
> ****************
> *******************
> World's Glaciers Show No Evidence of Global Warming
>
> Major Polar Glaciers are Expanding, Not Causing a Rise
> in Sea Level

Well, I'm not an expert on glaciers, but I wouldn't be surprised if it were true. IMHO, the real science behind the global warming debate can accurately be summarized as follows:

  1. The computer models used in pro-warming forecasts are utterly worthless. We barely know enough about climate change to make rough, short-term estimates. Detailed predictions about changes decades in the future are simply not possible - if you try to make a program to do that, all you get is an automated copy of your own biases.
  2. The experimental error in our global temperature measurements is at least as large as the changes that are being "measured". This means that we really can't tell if anything is happening or not.
  3. Climate changes have so many different effects that it is not at all clear whether a moderate warming would work out to be good or bad. There are lots of scary-sounding theories, but we have no idea if any of them are true or not.
  4. Improvements in the data over the last decade have tended to result in lower estimates for global warming. At this point the changes that most pro-warming scientists are predicting are smaller than the normal year-to-year climate variation, which leads me to suspect that the whole thing isn't worth worrying about.

If we really want to know what is going on here, we'll have to wait until the climatologists actually know enough to start making predictions (probably another decade or two given their current rate of progress). Of course, climate change is such a slow process that it shouldn't be a big issue to us anyway (that is, if you actually believe that nanotech & AI will happen in the next few decades).

Billy Brown, MCSE+I
bbrown@conemsco.com