Saving the Environment One Shower at a Time

I think this will be my new mantra. Do it for the planet. Take showers together.

So, we're supposed to do something about a report on climate change that says that it's quite likely that man is behind global warming. The report will peg it at 90% likely that the climate change is due to man.

Just exactly what is it that we're supposed to do? Tell Al Gore to stop flying around on GIII jets that spew out serious amounts of what he calls greenhouse gases? Stop using air conditioning or switching to CFLs? Just how far are they willing to take this - all on a belief that man is behind the change.

There's also the not insignificant problem of the modernization and urbanization of India and China whose combined populations would put any plan to curb greenhouse gases in the West to shame. The Chinese are bringing a new coal powered power plant online every week. No way that the Chinese are going to back off on their energy consumption - they're still in the process of electrifying their country. Same with India. There's also Africa, but they're much further behind in the process.

Even if the US and the West stop producing COx and other greenhouse gases, the numbers will continue to rise because of the developing world playing catchup. That's all from a policy position. Don Surber has more.

The science is just a wee bit more complex than the news reports and headlines would lead a reader to believe. The computer models that produce the results that form the basis of this report are just models. They're only as good as the data that is included, and we only have data from the last 100+ years from only a limited area of the planet. You cannot extrapolate weather data from Brooklyn to know what the weather is in Ridgewood, New Jersey (30 miles away and an elevation change of about 100 feet) yet these models are predicated on such extrapolations from data sets. Sure, these current climate models are better than earlier ones, but the shortcomings are still there as well.

Daily weather reports are based on probabilities - 70% chance of rain or snow. The reports change all the time because data and observations change. Yet, we're supposed to believe that an extrapolation 10-15-50-100 years into the future will be accurate?

More to the point, not all scientists believe that man is behind the climate change - and they're basing this on actual scientific observations, and not emotional attachments and beliefs:

Giegengack may have a personal 50-year perspective on global warming, but the time range he prefers to consult is more on the geologists’ scale. The Earth has been warming, he says, for about 20,000 years. We’ve only been collecting data on that trend for about 200 years. “For most of Earth history,” he says, “the globe has been warmer than it has been for the last 200 years. It has only rarely been cooler.” Those cooler periods have meant things like two miles of ice piled over much of what is now North America. Nothing to be nostalgic for.

The professor hits a button on his computer, and the really long-term view appears — the past 650,000 years. In that time, the Earth’s temperature has gone through regular cycles of rise and fall. The best explanation of those cycles was conceived by a Serbian amateur scientist named Milutin Milankovi´c. Very basically, Milankovi´c said this: The Earth’s orbit around the sun is more or less circular, but when other planets align in certain ways and their gravitational forces tug at the Earth, the orbit stretches into a more elliptical shape. Combined with the tilt of the Earth on its axis as it spins, that greater or lesser distance from the sun, plus the consequent difference in solar radiation that reaches our planet, is responsible for long-term climate change.

Things that make you go hmmm...