January 31, 2005
Global Warming Fact Source
"If dinosaurs once lived in Antarctica, why should we worry about global warming now?"
"Wasn't it warmer: a)60,000,000 years ago? b)20,000 years ago? c)400 years ago?
" I've heard that: a)just 30 years ago they thought the ice age was returning; b)they think that the sun is dimming and the earth is really cooling."
"I heard that: a) CO2; b) warmer temps will: a) make things grow better; b)make it rain more."
"How much could: a)a couple degrees; b)three degrees hurt anything?
"How much could: a)a couple inches; b)a couple feet; c)a couple yards of meltwater hurt anything? Maybe the tradeoffs will balance?"
"a) Okay, so there may be a little warming. So what? b)Everything changes...deal with it. We have air conditioning."
Maybe these questions sound funny or sad to you. Maybe they sound like serious holes in the "so-called-experts'" global warming scare. Maybe someone has said one of these things to you. Did you know the answer? Do you want to know the answer? Do you want it to go away?
Are you surprised that such an important issue could be considered a political position rather than a scientific one? Didn't that end with Galileo, or The Scopes Trial?
The academic and government climatologists who are working hard to understand global warming have become so frustrated by industry groups and phony cover organizations that misquote, distort, or manipulate data from their work, that they now have a blog-like website called www.realclimate.org where they a) respond to those questions posed by doubters, b) correct misquotations and misinterpretations from their publications, c) respond to criticisms and questions found in everything from radio broadcasts to novels. This web site has also been added to the AZ Master Naturalist blog in the Links column, under the topic: Sources to Help You look Wise and Settle Arguments.
The chart below is one version of the famous "hockey stick graph".
Comparison of warm-season (Jones et al., 1998) and annual mean (Mann et al., 1998, 1999) multi-proxy-based and warm season tree-ring-based (Briffa, 2000) millennial Northern Hemisphere temperature reconstructions. The recent instrumental annual mean Northern Hemisphere temperature record to 1999 is shown for comparison. Also shown is an extra-tropical sampling of the Mann et al. (1999) temperature pattern reconstructions more directly comparable in its latitudinal sampling to the Jones et al. series. The self-consistently estimated two standard error limits (shaded region) for the smoothed Mann et al. (1999) series are shown. The horizontal zero line denotes the 1961 to 1990 reference period mean temperature. All series were smoothed with a 40-year Hamming-weights lowpass filter, with boundary constraints imposed by padding the series with its mean values during the first and last 25 years.