Thursday, October 15, 2009
Global Warming or Global Cooling?
So I logged in to Yahoo! this morning to check my e-mail and this article was on the front page warning us that the Arctic ice cap is going to disappear within the next 20 to 30 years. Is the mainstream media telling us the truth with these kind of alarmist stories regarding global warming? Just yesterday I stumbled across this article, which was written in January of 2009 and states that the world has actually been in a period of global COOLING for the past 8 years. Doing a little more research, I found this article, which discusses a recent speech by one of the world's leading climate change scientists, Professor Mojib Latif of Germany's Leibniz Institute, where he acknowledged that the world has now entered a cooling phase and was likely to remain in that cooling phase for the next 10 to 20 years. What makes this really interesting is that Latif was formerly one of the most outspoken scientists in the world regarding the threat of global warming. Even more interesting, and also being ignored by the mainstream media in the United States, is the fact that the Antarctic ice cap is now growing and scientists are attributing that fact to the Ozone hole. WHAT? So now the ozone hole is causing more sea ice? What exactly is going on here? Quite possibly, no one knows what the real answer is. The world's climate and weather patterns are being affected by an almost infinite number of variables. As a result, it is impossible to create a model attempting to predict patterns of climate change without failing to control for any number of variables.
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I think the big issue is that there is so much recent data, but because these processes are so lengthy (thousands or tens of thousands of years), and because ice core samples don't necessarily convey the kind of information that these analyses require, the paucity of historical data makes it a gut-check for today's scientists and there is no real precision in the analysis.
ReplyDeleteI was thinking about this topic yesterday and I did some quick research on who owns the arctic. If the ice floes open up, obviously that ownership becomes a matter of national interest. The UN recently passed the Convention on the Law of the Sea, which says basically that if a (signatory) country can scientifically demonstrate that its continental shelf extends under a tract of seabed, it can assert legal ownership of that territory. Of course, the US, despite conducting these surveys, has not signed the agreement. If the arctic opens up, there is a TON of mineral wealth down there- oil, gold, nickel, etc.
Thanks for the comment Eric. I think we are in agreement on your first point. The combination of a lack of reputable data to track these processes and the fact that there are so many things going on that impact them seems to make any conclusions drawn about what might happen in the future extremely suspect.
ReplyDeleteAs for your second point, I don't think it is any of the UN's business to decide who owns the arctic. Further, it will be a sad day when the US signs on to the treaty of the seas and opens the doorway to a one-world government a little wider.