in Musings |

Global Warming

I’m finally getting around to reading Al Gore’s book, An Inconvenient Truth [warning: music]. I had been unsure about man’s effects on global warming, thinking that the earth warms and cools all the time. Then Gore sprung one of his “aha!” graphs on me: a graph showing the direct correlation of global temperatures and carbon dioxide content derived from Antartic ice cores. Every time there was an increase of CO2 in the atmosphere, the temperature spiked as well, this from a core drilling that spans hundreds of thousands of years.

The other “aha” moment was the mentioning that as the atmosphere gets warmer, it can hold more moisture, which means the moisture in the ground will be drawn into the air. This makes for dry, cracked ground and more unarable land, not what a world with a growing population needs.

Say what you want about the guy everyone jokes about having invented the Internets, but Gore’s science is sound. That’s what makes it so scary. It’s not just hype. If we keep burning CO2 the way we are, we are on a collision course with disaster.

Something’s got to change.

Published

  2. Dear Mark,

    Please hand in your card…

    Sincerely,
    The Libertarian Party

  3. What does politics have to do with this? As far as I know, the studies didn’t include the voting records of the oxygen isotopes they studied.

    The ice cores show a corresponding increase in both temperature and CO2 concentrations. The cores span a period of hundreds of thousands of years. Is this so hard to understand?

    See for yourself: Ice Core Data

    Frankly I’m disappointed that you, a physics major, would dismiss the science simply because Al Gore is raising awareness of it. You should be thanking the man.

  4. Wasn’t the concern global freezing in the 1970’s?

    Do you think that maybe the temp. and co2 conc. in the cores of the ice have to do with natural cycles in the earth?

    I do thank Al Gore for being such a dufus that GW was elected.

  5. We have learned a great deal more about our fragile planet since the 1970s, my friend.

    I did think that natural cycles might have affected earth’s temparatures, but the correlation of CO2 gases with temperature shown in the ice cores convince me that CO2 is definitely involved in the process.

    There is also no doubt nor debate that CO2 levels have risen considerably in the last century. If global warming increases in relation to CO2, as the ice cores suggest, we are in for a bumpy ride.

  6. well, since Al Gore is a politician and not a scientist I think politics has everything to do with it.

    But, mostly I was being sarcastic…lighten up, Francis!! 🙂

  7. Ok, so I was curious about the “crisis” and dug out a few articles for everyone’s benefit.

    Some of them are probably propaganda while others are more fact based. I’ll let the reader make their own conclusion. Isn’t that nice of me? 🙂

    http://www.opinionjournal.com/

    http://www.junkscience.com/

    http://www.canadafreepress.com/

    http://article.nationalreview.com/

    this last article is interesting because it talks about Canada moving away from the Kyoto treaty on the advice of 60 scientists.
    http://www.telegraph.co.uk/

Comments are closed.