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***** Rant Warning! *****
So I’m on this dive charter boat the other day. Between dives the captain starts spouting things about how global warming isn’t real, scientists don’t know what’s happening, and all the usual Gore-bashing rhetoric, etc. The rest of the divers nod silently, like dazed Mooney cultists.
I just want to tell this guy, “Dude, I’ve spent the last 12 years helping scientists study this stuff and you know what? You’re a total %$!#@* ignoramus!” But I also want to be picked up after the next dive, so I don’t say anything. It wouldn’t have changed his mind anyway.
Aaargh.
g
I run into this every few days. Mostly I respond with that fact that everyone now thinks global warming is happening, the only question is how much is caused by man. Next is a whole lecture about ice cores and how they tell the age, and the temperature and how they date the cores and that they can pretty much tell what the temperature was at any time in the past. Then tell how the rate of global warming in the past was gradual. I walk across the room and draw out the graph in the air. Next I point out that the rate of rise in this global warming is greater than has ever been seen. I do that by taking the same air graph that went across the room before and make it go to the ceiling in a couple of steps and mention that it almost exactly coincides with the industrial age. Lastly I point out that pretty much the only studies that don’t recognise the warming are those paid for by the energy companies.
It usually works well.Anytime I wonder if Global warming is really happening I just think about what winters and summers used to be like in Colorado… we used to average over 300″ of snow in the mountains every winter and at least several feet during the winter here in the front range during the winter. Now we are lucky to get rain during the winter. During the summer we used to have maybe one or 2 weeks all summer long that the mountains would get above 80 and never in the low 90’s now they stay in the 80’s a lot and see 90’s frequently. We used to see maybe a week of 100’s total during the whole summer…now they string that way for weeks on end… and what rain…Look at the fires that are burning out of control across the United States every summer over the past 10 years… Nope there is no such thing as Global Warming… My ass…
When I first started working in the USAP, the discussion between the scientists tended to be “Is it happening?”
Then, for a long time the question became, “Okay, we think it’s happening. How much of it is caused by people (anthropogenic sources)?”
Since then the discussion has become, “How bad will it get?”
Outspoken critics — almost always with a political or economic agenda — catch the headlines, but you will find very few skeptics within the scientific community.
glenn
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