Friday, May 20, 2011

Global Warming Objections, Part II: Weathermen & Climatologists

by Chuck Hall

A question or comment you often hear a lot when talking about global warming is this question: “My local weatherman can’t even tell me what the weather will be like tomorrow. How can I believe scientists when they tell me that global warming is happening?”
To start with, meteorology and climatology are entirely different sciences. Meteorology looks at short-term events and tries to predict the outcome. Even though they can’t nail it on the head all the time, they still have a pretty good average. Climatology, on the other hand, looks at long-range patterns.
Suppose you have a nickel, and I ask you to predict the outcome of a single coin toss. You have a fifty-fifty chance of correctly predicting the outcome. Now let’s say I ask you to predict the outcome over five coin tosses. Let’s say you go out on a limb and predict that all five tosses will be ‘heads.’ If all five coin tosses came up ‘heads,’ it would be unusual, but not outside of the realm of possibility. With each additional coin toss, however, the average would begin to approach the fifty-fifty mark. The more points of data you have, the more accurate the result will be.
Meteorology is attempting to predict the outcome of a single coin toss. Climatology, on the other hand, has much more data at its disposal. Climate scientists now have ice core data from 650,000 years of core samples with which to make their predictions. The more data they have, the more accurate their predictions. This huge amount of data upon which to make predictions over long spans of time is much more accurate than trying to predict a single day’s weather, simply because the amount of data used to make predictions is so large.
NASA scientist James Hansen states that the ‘tilting point’ for global warming is 350 parts per million of carbon dioxide. Beyond that point, climate change can be demonstrated beyond all reasonable doubt to be caused largely by human activities. Scientists studying atmospheric carbon dioxide now routinely observe figures of 383 parts per million or higher. Ice core data on trapped atmospheric carbon dioxide shows that throughout most of the 650,000 year history of the ice core data studied, carbon dioxide levels ranged from 100 parts per million to 300 parts per million, but at roughly the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere began to slowly increase to the present range. It is an established fact that carbon dioxide contributes to the greenhouse effect, so it is only natural to assume that more carbon dioxide equals higher temperatures.
While it is a scientific axiom that correlation does not prove causality, global temperatures have been rising in parallel with the amount of carbon dioxide in the air. Those who claim that ‘correlation does not prove causality’ are stuck with providing an alternate proposal. If carbon dioxide isn’t responsible for the increase in global average temperature, what is?

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