Global Warming?
This particular topic is one that I’ve always been interested in, but frankly it also tends to be one I avoid talking about. Simply put, people tend to be obnoxious about it. The number of people out there that accept the tidbits of “evidence” provided by Al Gore and his friends is staggering and that tends to put people like me at odds with the masses. My stance on the issue can be summarized as being that of a proper scientist. I no more accept that global warming is simply a given than I believe the Earth is about to become little more than a nearly spherical ice ball winging through space. My basis for this stance is information and an understanding of the scientific method.
In trying to be accurate to the nearest half a billion years or so I will, for the sake of conversation, accept that the Earth is roughly 4.5 billion years old. I will ignore that the place wouldn’t have been much fun to hang out on while it was still cooling down into a vaguely solid blob of rock, and that dinosaurs that would eventually call the place home failed entirely to keep good records of the weather while they were here. For them it probably seemed like the 165 million years or so they wandered around were just a lovely time indeed. I’m going somewhere with this, I swear. It is commonly accepted that the temperature on Earth was way higher when they were around than it is now. I don’t mean when they were busy getting extinct either, I mean when they were thriving.
By comparison, us silly little bipeds that for all evolutionary evidence seem to have jumped out of trees, have only been hanging around for a mere handful of hundred thousand years. If you are a big fan of cavemen that aren’t specifically homo sapiens, we could say the number is pushing 4 million years. A mere drop in the pail next to dinosaurs’ stay. People in some form or other have experienced several climate changes, in both directions. Everything from mini-ice ages to warmer phases. Looking back on history, both human and geological, it’s pretty easy to determine that as a species we do way better when the climate is warmer than we do when it’s colder. For that reason, global warming, as people like to panic about, is not in fact so bad at all.
Add to this story the part where our little blob of cooled rock which, on a cosmic scale, cooled down like yesterday, is in orbit of an impressive ball of fusing hydrogen. We like to call it the sun, and it has all sorts of funny patterns it follows with everything it does. Loads of somehow detectible sine wave like patterns all superimposed on each other. These include an apparent 11 year cycle of sun spot activity, a magnetic cycle that is around 22 years long, cyclic changes in the radiation output of the sun include a whopping 27 harmonic cycles lining up in a 273 month parent cycle, and several others falling into 87, 105, 131, 210, 232, 385, 504, 805, and 2300 year patterns. In other words, the sun is practically random in its layering of patterns. When several patterns line up on the same side of the sine wave the resulting change can be pretty impressive.
At the end of the day, the sun, for better or for worse, powers basically everything that happens on this planet. Weather, planetary cooling, global warming, etc. There are people jumping around about 0.2° C changes in one direction or the other and claiming that means something important. In a statistical light, there are 3 time periods that people are using to determine whether or not global warming is happening. Geological evidence duration appears to be able to reach back with any level of accuracy to around 10,000 years ago. Human instrument records of weather and almost countless other things are limited on the outside to around 100 years worth of data. Recent global warming panic can be traced back to 15 or so years worth of information. Go ahead and divide each of those numbers by 4.5 billion and see how statistically important the results are.
Human beings are proud. We like to think that driving cars around powered by dead dinosaurs has a massive impact on the planet. We also like to think that cow farts from Oklahoma have an impact, so it stands to reason that you may not be able to go by our opinions on this matter. In truth, the planet has been here for a very long time, and us, not so much. I certainly don’t discount that people can change their environments for better or for worse, but I also take that amount of change with a grain of salt when compared to local impact of things like a sun that pours out 3.86 decillion watts a second.
All I ask of my readers is to imagine for a moment the wicked number of influences that control something as complex as planetary climate. Whether you take a couple of soggy ice caps to spell impending doom or sunspots failing to show up on time meaning we will all be popsicles, you should consider that no one really knows. To pretend that you can take a nearly nano-scale piece of the curve and extrapolate an opinion is funny to begin with, but to consider it more than an opinion is practically heresy. Action taken to “correct” the perceived problem is downright dangerous. We are almost equally likely to make the problem worse as we are to fix anything simply thanks to the fact that we are making decisions based on a system we do not, and likely cannot ever, fully understand.