Climate change

Many educated people in society often confuse and misuse these terms and some others.

  • Perhaps the Earth is warming up -- the evidence is not yet completely convincing. If so, then global warming would actually exist.

  • However, even if the Earth is warming up, it has not yet been proven that humans have anything to do with it. Recall the overheads.

  • There is furthermore no direct evidence that global warming has any effect on the season to season weather in, say, Flagstaff. There is absolutely no reason to think that the storm we had this week has anything to do with global temperatures.

  • Alarmists often point to hot summers as evidence of global warming while disregarding that January, 2004, was one of the coldest months on record in Philadelphia, and that last year we had one of the cloudiest months on record. If you keep records long enough on enough different weather parameters, every year is bound to be superlative in some way: this is the nature of (natural) statistical fluctuations.

  • El Nino is a weather pattern that develops every other year or so, derived from temperature patterns in the eastern Pacific Ocean. El Nino is not a climate pattern, nor does it apparently have anything to do with global warming or the greenhouse effect. Giving a natural phenomenon a name does not imply that we understand it at all, nor that it is linked to any other obsserved "pattern."

  • Finally, it is not even clear that a rise in global temperatures could truly occur to a large degree. As temperatures increased, more water would evaporate from the oceans, causing the formation of more clouds. Increased cloud cover could mean that the planet, overall, becomes more white, when viewed from space. A white planet reflects a lot of the incoming sunlight, which means that less sunlight would reach the surface, which would be followed by a decrease in surface temperatures. This is called a negative feedback loop and a climate equilibrium is implied. No one knows if this really would/could/did happen (is happening), but it is one possibility.

    Take home lesson: lots of people talk about global warming and the greenhouse effect without knowing what they are talking about. Educate yourselves, and the people around you.

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