This is my blog. There are many like it, but this one is mine. My blog is NOT my best friend. It is NOT my life. I do NOT have to master it as I must master my life. My blog, without me is NOT useless. It simply won't get updated. I must write my blog true, except when it serves my purposes to do otherwise. I must write better than other bloggers who are trying to outblog me. Or not.
There comes a point when a skeptic becomes a contrarian or worse a denialist. Case in point: global warming. How does one find what real skeptics think about global warming? Googling doesn’t help. There’s too much noise.
I suppose my starting point would be Skeptical Inquirer or The Skeptic and to look at what well respected skeptics have to say on the matter. But in the end it isn’t their opinion that matters. What matters are their critical skills that a lay person can use to sort out the evidence and the science. As a lay person I can’t go drill ice cores and measure trace amounts of gas. I can’t examine sediment cores or tree rings. I don’t have time to sort out existing temperature records or greenhouse gas measurements over time.
I think the term skeptic has picked up some negative connotations. In that it is a philosophy that rejects everything. I would like to see myself as a rationalist. Someone who strives to look at the world and science in manner that helps to build up a better picture of the world. The problem is anytime anyone comes up with a useful descriptive term it gets co-opted by assholes. And it gets redefined into meaning the exact opposite of what it’s supposed to be or into meaning whatever they want it to mean. It becomes white noise. They aren’t assholes. They are cocksuckers.
I just finished reading The Sun Kings by Stuart Clark. It’s one of best science books I’ve read in a long time. I heard an interview with the author on The Naked Scientist podcast back in April. The discussion was mainly about this largest solar magnetic storm ever to hit the Earth back in 1859. Auroras were seen as far south as Cuba. Telegraphs were disrupted. Operators were electrocuted. If a storm of equal power were to hit the Earth today the effects would be devastating. There’s a transcript of the podcast and you can just read the discussion with Clark.
The last chapter dealt with Global Warming. The suspected causes of global warming are becoming more and more like the murder suspects in Murder On The Orient Express. Everyone did it. Humans are pumping out an unprecedented amount of carbon into the atmosphere. The Sun is also having an impact. It is well established that periods of reduced sunspots corresponded to periods of global cooling and increased sunspots just the opposite. Here’s the kicker. It’s not because of solar variance.
It seems that with increased sunspots there is increased magnetic activity which blocks the amount of cosmic rays the Earth receives. There is a theory that cosmic rays may help to form clouds or rather create the nucleations necessary for droplets to condense. So if the Earth is not being bombarded by cosmic rays less clouds form and more sunlight gets through thus warming the Earth. Here is an article about a proposed experiment to test that theory. Finding a heavenly key to climate change.
Some people think that man-made causes of increased global temperature is mutually exclusive with natural causes of increased temperature. If increased solar magnetic activity is reducing cloud cover and humans reducing the amount of particulates in the atmosphere are happening at the same time that’s a double whammy. But we are also pumping out carbon dioxide and with increased numbers of factory farms our livestock are pumping out record amounts of methane and nitrous oxide. That makes it a quadruple whammy.
However it is possible there could still yet be some other unknown factor responsible for increased cloud cover when sunspots are at a minimum.
I was trying to figure out how to get evangelicals to vote for Obama come November. Then it hit me. He’s the Antichrist. (He’s not of course, and it would be mindbogglingly irresponsible of me to even suggest it). The evangelical Christians think the world is going to end realsoonnow and that Armageddon is just around the corner. But it’s worse than that. They are actively trying to bring it about. One hopes that Bush’s faith is more lip service than real and that he is cynically manipulating evangelicals. At least his handlers are.
Evangelicals are active supporters of Israel, and the Israelis take advantage of that support even though the support is contingent upon bringing about The Rapture. So I had the thought that well if the evangelicals see Obama as the Antichrist it would mean that realsoonnow is going to be REALSOONNOW and they’ll all get transported to Heaven via the Archangel Scotty’s magical transporter beam. Since some of them are actively trying to bring about the end of the world, they know a vote for Obama would bring them one step closer to God. The only problem with that is in the Book of Revelations the Antichrist suffers a fatal wound and miraculously recovers. Who among us doesn’t think that Obama were he elected POTUS would not be targeted more than Bush?
Did I mention that it would be mindbogglingly irresponsible to suggest it? Oh, wait. I’m writing about Glenn Beck. Never mind.
If you google Bush and antichrist you get 141,000 hits. Cheney and antichrist gets 222,000 hits. Clinton and antichrist gets you 548,000 hits. Obama and antichrist gets a whopping 643,000 hits. There’s been so much speculation even Snopes has to deal with the question: Is Barack Obama the Anti-Christ? Sigh.
Of course we all know that Ronald Wilson Reagan is the Antichrist. So once he reappears, we know it’ll be the end of the world. I expect that to happen realsoonnow.
It’s really only within the last three years that I came to accept global warming and that humans were responsible. I’d been a skeptic for the stupidest of reasons: because the way the media portrayed it. Most science reporting in the mainstream media sucks because of they… well, don’t understand science. Rather than going over the evidence they would keep citing scientific consensus. To me because to me that smacked of argument from authority. But when I saw this BBC
In pictures: How the world is changing I had to take a step back and reassess my understanding or rather my ignorance. I then bypassed the MSM and started looking at the evidence not the consensus. The tree rings, the ice cores, and the sediment cores. I already knew that the Earth’s climate had changed dramatically over the eons, but now it is humans who are driving the change not nature. And not in a good way.
As I’ve educated myself and verified that the science is good, I’ve started googling some of the authors and thinkers I’ve admired on what they had to say or if they had anything to say on the subject. I remember a scene from the 1979 PBS adaptation of Ursula K. LeGuin’s 1971 novel The Lathe of Heaven. It was people complaining at how warm it had gotten in Portland from the way it used to be. Actually the book is very prophetic about the world we live in today.
I found two very telling quotes, one from Buckminster Fuller and the other from Isaac Asimov. I chose them because both are deceased, and they do not have the added benefit of what we know now.
From Buckminster Fuller’s book Critical Path (p. 112) published in 1981:
“those who own oil also own the atomic energy and have long ago assumed that, if humanity exhausts or abandons oil, it will automatically switch over to atomic energy. Humanity has had nothing to say about all this because the know-how was so obscure and the lawyers’ strategems so invisibly large. The lawyers’ omnilegal international strategems were and as yet are so obscure, in fact, that no government authorities – let alone the public – knew that the world energy monopoly’s scientists had not taken into account earthquakes, for instance, in the construction of New England atomic energy plants, nor had the public or government anticipated that the intuitive wisdom of humanity would develop such an antipathy to atomic energy as eventually to force lawyer capitalism to fall back on its ‘ownable’ coal mines and shale for conversion into pipable and meterable liquid fuels. It is as yet inscrutable to the public, government, and lawyer capitalism just how strong literate humanity’s intuitive wisdom will be in preventing the full-scale conversion of coal and shale into liquid energy fuel when it learns, as it has now been learned in a scientifically undeniable way, that this selfishly exploitable energy fuel strategy will inexorably destroy the atmosphere’s capability of supporting biological life on planet Earth. Like all fossil fuels coal gives off carbon dioxide when burned, but coal gives off 25 percent more of it per unit of energy than oil and 50 percent more than natural gas. Although carbon dioxide comprises less than 1 percent of the Earth’s atmospheric gases, this concentration has risen 17 percent since preindustrial times and is expected to rise an equivalent amount in the next twenty years. The ‘greenhouse’ effect from the Sun’s heat and increasing amounts of this otherwise harmless gas could send average global temperatures soaring by as much as 6 degrees Farenheit within fifty years according to a U.S. government study. This unprecedented global environmental catastophe would be virtually irreversible for centuries.
“No one knows whether the cessation of the waste radiation of atomic energy exploitation or the cessation of coal and shale conversion into fluid fuel will occur in time to permit the physical continuance of humans on planet Earth. What we do know however, as we have previously stated, is (1) that, with the unselfish use of technology, it is now possible to take care of all humanity at a higher standard of living than any have ever experienced and do so on a sustaining basis by employing only our daily energy income from Sun and gravity and (2) that we can do so in time to permit the healthy continuance of humans on plant Earth.”
And Isaac Asimov had this to say about global warming in 1989:
Update
I just couldn’t leave well enough alone 1989, 1981, 1971. I managed to find a concern about pumping lots of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere from 1958:
First there was the Pioneer anomaly and then came the Flyby anomaly. Are they related? And now I’m reading the history of Planet X. Mike Brown, the astronomer whose discovery of Eris led to the demotion of Pluto, has a blog post entitled: Planet X uncovered (again?). As I was reading it, I had a thought is it possible the observed anomalies of Kuiper belt objects related?
My ignorance of orbital mechanics, Newtonian and Einsteinian physics is pretty profound, so my speculation here is very crude and there may be no connection with any of these. Astronomers can measure changes in velocity pretty accurately and compare them against what theory predicts. The problem is there are very very tiny differences between what is predicted and what was measured. The scientists don’t know if there are errors in their calculations or measurements or more importantly maybe there is some new physics at work.
They’ve repeated these calculations and measurements enough to go “hmm… there may be something else here.” If none of these anomalies are related and they are real, that would imply three new area of physics. If they are related then that would certainly simplify things and add more evidence to that ‘hmmm…’ thing.
I have one more question. Dark matter is still a major mystery but astronomers can detect it’s effects on a macro scale (galactic). Could it be there is a property of dark matter on a micro scale (solar system) that is the root cause of these anomalies? Again these may be totally unrelated and my understanding of astrophysics is pretty abysmal but it might be worth looking into.