I went to a public lecture by Richard Muller about 6 months ago (also talked to him in my office afterwards for a while too) where a lot of it was aimed at trying to separate fact from fiction in global warming. This is a man who has had a very diverse career in physics, starting in particle physics under Luis Alvarez, then moving into cosmology, then earth sciences, and now serves on a US DoD advisory board who publishes reports on everything from nuclear threats to global warming reports. Also happens to be a MacArthur fellow, and author of Physics for Future Presidents.
Anyway, he spent about half the time debunking the conservatives' skepticism about whether global warming is manmade, and the other half of the time debunking the environmental "alarmists" such as Al Gore, whom he says is just as much a "climate skeptic" for disbelieving the consensus in the other direction from the conservatives. One of his examples was the graphs of the frequency of wildfires and hurricanes that Gore used in his movie... according to Muller, he tricks people into thinking that the number of hurricanes has been increasing by reporting it in terms of property damage unadjusted for inflation, which is obviously going up. And he tricks people into thinking that the California wildfires is going up by only recording certain types of wildfires. He showed his own graphs of both of them, which indicated that neither the frequency of hurricanes nor the frequency of wildfires has changed noticeably at all within the past few decades.
Someone asked him in Q&A what other evidence of global warming is there besides the fraction of a degree increase in global temperature. He said that the IPCC reports only acknowledge two pieces of substantiated evidence, just the temperature increase itself and the fact that the arctic polar icecap is shrinking. But he added that personally, he didn't think they should have included the arctic icecap in the report, since the antarctic icecap has been growing whereas climate models have predicted both of them should be shrinking.
Maybe he is biased, but he seemed like he was really trying to be as balanced about the whole thing as he could and that he's done a lot of investigation into it to get the whole story.
After thinking about it, though, I probably should make my 4 on that one into a 6 or more. The truth is, I really can't tell... I am skeptical of articles I see like the Guardian one you linked to... I've seen similar ones in Sci Am. I think most or all of the bad things that happen are going to be in the future, not in the past... and it's very tempting to take any slightly unusual pattern and attribute it to global warming. Saying that some small fraction of it is due to global warming seems no better than saying that some small fraction of the failure of a particular woman to do well in a mathematical field is due to a slight shift in the bell curve for all women.
no subject
I went to a public lecture by Richard Muller about 6 months ago (also talked to him in my office afterwards for a while too) where a lot of it was aimed at trying to separate fact from fiction in global warming. This is a man who has had a very diverse career in physics, starting in particle physics under Luis Alvarez, then moving into cosmology, then earth sciences, and now serves on a US DoD advisory board who publishes reports on everything from nuclear threats to global warming reports. Also happens to be a MacArthur fellow, and author of Physics for Future Presidents.
Anyway, he spent about half the time debunking the conservatives' skepticism about whether global warming is manmade, and the other half of the time debunking the environmental "alarmists" such as Al Gore, whom he says is just as much a "climate skeptic" for disbelieving the consensus in the other direction from the conservatives. One of his examples was the graphs of the frequency of wildfires and hurricanes that Gore used in his movie... according to Muller, he tricks people into thinking that the number of hurricanes has been increasing by reporting it in terms of property damage unadjusted for inflation, which is obviously going up. And he tricks people into thinking that the California wildfires is going up by only recording certain types of wildfires. He showed his own graphs of both of them, which indicated that neither the frequency of hurricanes nor the frequency of wildfires has changed noticeably at all within the past few decades.
Someone asked him in Q&A what other evidence of global warming is there besides the fraction of a degree increase in global temperature. He said that the IPCC reports only acknowledge two pieces of substantiated evidence, just the temperature increase itself and the fact that the arctic polar icecap is shrinking. But he added that personally, he didn't think they should have included the arctic icecap in the report, since the antarctic icecap has been growing whereas climate models have predicted both of them should be shrinking.
Maybe he is biased, but he seemed like he was really trying to be as balanced about the whole thing as he could and that he's done a lot of investigation into it to get the whole story.
After thinking about it, though, I probably should make my 4 on that one into a 6 or more. The truth is, I really can't tell... I am skeptical of articles I see like the Guardian one you linked to... I've seen similar ones in Sci Am. I think most or all of the bad things that happen are going to be in the future, not in the past... and it's very tempting to take any slightly unusual pattern and attribute it to global warming. Saying that some small fraction of it is due to global warming seems no better than saying that some small fraction of the failure of a particular woman to do well in a mathematical field is due to a slight shift in the bell curve for all women.