My children roll their eyes and groan when I say I don't know what to think about climate change.
I hasten to add that as a working hypothesis, it seems practical to behave as if the climate is getting warmer and to do the things various scientists have suggested to not contribute to global warming--like moving to wind and solar power and away from coal, which is nasty in many other respects.
But read Wikipeda on geologic global temperature change and you see that over eons, hundreds of millions of years, the earth has warmed and cooled dramatically: There were times, I'm told, when palm trees and crocodiles lived north of the Artic circle and there were no polar ice caps.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geologic_temperature_record
I am loathe to align myself with Neanderthals like Robert Murray who owns coal mines and starts from the premise that nothing he could be doing could possible be hurting the planet, but I do recognize, I do not subscribe nor do I read the geologic equivalent of the New England Journal of Medicine. I cannot read this literature critically and analytically, the way I do for the NEJM.
Many of the arguments begin with "most scientists agree" and all I can say to that line of argument is I can remember many instances when most doctors agreed on "facts" which were later proved completely wrong. What other people think does not impress me. What I'd like to see is how do we measure what the climate of the planet has been and if we once had palm trees in Greenland, what does that mean for our dread of a warmer planet now?
I hasten to add that as a working hypothesis, it seems practical to behave as if the climate is getting warmer and to do the things various scientists have suggested to not contribute to global warming--like moving to wind and solar power and away from coal, which is nasty in many other respects.
But read Wikipeda on geologic global temperature change and you see that over eons, hundreds of millions of years, the earth has warmed and cooled dramatically: There were times, I'm told, when palm trees and crocodiles lived north of the Artic circle and there were no polar ice caps.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geologic_temperature_record
I am loathe to align myself with Neanderthals like Robert Murray who owns coal mines and starts from the premise that nothing he could be doing could possible be hurting the planet, but I do recognize, I do not subscribe nor do I read the geologic equivalent of the New England Journal of Medicine. I cannot read this literature critically and analytically, the way I do for the NEJM.
Many of the arguments begin with "most scientists agree" and all I can say to that line of argument is I can remember many instances when most doctors agreed on "facts" which were later proved completely wrong. What other people think does not impress me. What I'd like to see is how do we measure what the climate of the planet has been and if we once had palm trees in Greenland, what does that mean for our dread of a warmer planet now?
No comments:
Post a Comment