Global Warming

Global warming, climate change or (as the scientists call it) "temperature anomalies") is a complicated business. Imagine trying to measure the near-surface air temperatures and ocean water temperatures all over the world and average them out to account for night vs. day and summer vs. winter. Even in my home town of Denver, Colorado, the apparent average temperatures dropped 3-5 degrees when they moved the official weather station from the old airport to the new one.


By the time you're through compiling all this stuff, you have a set of numbers that almost no one can understand. On top of that, they usually report, not an actual temperature, but the difference from an abitrarily-chosen index -- the average of the 1951-1980 period.


As a "numbers guy", I can guess why they do it. There's so much variability from place to place and season to season, that the variation disguises trends. But, the average person is left asking, "What does it really mean?" Let's try to get to the bottom of that.


Now, some dispute that it's even true that the earth is warming up (We got all that snow this winter!) or that the cause is mostly human (Maybe, the sun is getting hotter). Or, they distrust the data because some of the scientists acted in petty ways, trying to squelch critics. (Any college logic student would label that an "ad hominen" argument.) Gosh, there are even some who maintain that the earth is only thousands -- rather than billions -- of years old.


I'm not in those camps; I look , for example, at the shrinking of mountain glaciers & polar ice caps and conclude something's going on that we need to work on. Unfortunately, I also conclude it may already be too late to prevent severe damage. Global political urgency to take uncomfortable actions doesn't match the problem.

Has the world been warmer in the distant past? Yes, of course. Do we want to go back to those times? Almost certainly not.

If you thnk the East Anglia crowd might have been fudging the data, what is your opinion of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies? (You know NASA, the agency that figured out how to put men on the moon and weather satellites in space. ) Well, they're the source for the original data, which you can see for yourself at http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/ . Simply look at the graphs (or the tabular data) and you'll notice a few things:

• Yes, climate runs in cycles -- of about 7 to 11 years per cycle -- but
• There is a steadily increasing temperature trend; since 1910, each minimum of a cycle is higher than the one before;
• A big jump occurred between about 1910 and 1943, roughly consistent with use of internal combustion engines;
• The temperature was fairly stable between 1951 and 1980 (Thus, its choice for the index.) and
• An even bigger jump has happened after 1978 -- perhaps related to global industrializtion.

We've only been able to measure carbo dioxide (a greenhouse gas) in the atmosphere since about 1959. The place chosen for measuring is Mauna Loa, an extinct volcano standing high in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. That graph, at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_dioxide_in_Earth's_atmosphere, shows a logarithmic increasing trend of CO2 in the air. This pattern, too, is consistent with the temprature increases.

Put it all together and it looks beyond a reasonable doubt that the world's climate is getting warmer and that much of this situation is human-caused.

But, global warming may now be a freight train running out of control with the throttle down. It also seems certain that -- even if we could reduce greenhouse gases going into the air today -- they would linger and cause more warming in coming decades. As the Arctic permafrost thaws, it releases methane, another greenhouse gas. The polar bears, I fear, are doomed.

Should we give up then and resign ourselves to our fate? Absolutely not! Serious problems need serious action. We may yet save ourselves from the worst of the crisis.