Its the end of the world. Seriously guys, we mean it this time.
0 Comments Published by Ryan on 4/09/2007 at 3:18 PM.
A shocking display of intellectual honesty from Newsweek:
You have to admit, it really takes an astonishing level of hubris to faithfully stand by weather forecasts for the year 2040 and beyond, given the industry's notorious unreliability of past weather predictions.
Wasn't last year supposed to be one of the most active hurricane seasons on record? Yes it was, except that when the hurricanes failed to form, the industry quietly issued a press release and a "refinement due to better data," which has become industry-standard slang for "our past models were complete bullshit, but now we've added new data and created new models, which we assure you are no longer bullshit." Repeat ad nauseum.
The central issue in this debate isn't whether the Earth is warming - clearly it is. Rather, the issue is what role we humans, with our gas guzzling SUVs and our private jets, are playing in the Earth's recent warming trend.
Putting the environmentalists' apocolyptic rhetoric aside, if one has at least a shred of intellectual honesty left in this debate, you have to consider the possibility that this latest global warming trend is nothing more than a short-term fluctuation.
In the 1970s, environmentalists warned of a pending ice age - which never came. In the '80s - acid rain was the doomsday du jour. In fact, environmentalists, with the support of the media, have alternated between at least four separate global cooling and warming scares since the late 1800s. Each time these climate scares eventually faded away, and new projections along with new doomsday scenarios were issued, due to "refinements due to better data."
What most commentators—and many scientists—seem to miss is that the only thing we can say with certainly about climate is that it changes. The earth is always warming or cooling by as much as a few tenths of a degree a year; periods of constant average temperatures are rare. Looking back on the earth's climate history, it's apparent that there's no such thing as an optimal temperature—a climate at which everything is just right. The current alarm rests on the false assumption not only that we live in a perfect world, temperaturewise, but also that our warming forecasts for the year 2040 are somehow more reliable than the weatherman's forecast for next week.
You have to admit, it really takes an astonishing level of hubris to faithfully stand by weather forecasts for the year 2040 and beyond, given the industry's notorious unreliability of past weather predictions.
Wasn't last year supposed to be one of the most active hurricane seasons on record? Yes it was, except that when the hurricanes failed to form, the industry quietly issued a press release and a "refinement due to better data," which has become industry-standard slang for "our past models were complete bullshit, but now we've added new data and created new models, which we assure you are no longer bullshit." Repeat ad nauseum.
The central issue in this debate isn't whether the Earth is warming - clearly it is. Rather, the issue is what role we humans, with our gas guzzling SUVs and our private jets, are playing in the Earth's recent warming trend.
Putting the environmentalists' apocolyptic rhetoric aside, if one has at least a shred of intellectual honesty left in this debate, you have to consider the possibility that this latest global warming trend is nothing more than a short-term fluctuation.
In the 1970s, environmentalists warned of a pending ice age - which never came. In the '80s - acid rain was the doomsday du jour. In fact, environmentalists, with the support of the media, have alternated between at least four separate global cooling and warming scares since the late 1800s. Each time these climate scares eventually faded away, and new projections along with new doomsday scenarios were issued, due to "refinements due to better data."
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