Science

 Ok, a few more thoughts on global warming, or climate change.

So I have read a bit more of the Politically Incorrect Guide to Climate Change.

I am more and more convinced that the governments and scientific establishment have gone completely bonkers in deciding that human created CO2 is what is going to cause us all to be warmed into extinction.

Now to back up a bit. Let me talk science.

I am a scientist, legit.  I have Ph.D. in materials science and engineering. So does Kevin.

Now, as a scientist, I would say I have more knowledge of science than most people. I mean, I spent almost 10 long years in college studying science.

Ok, this is HUGE!

Different  branches of science are ... different.

Take materials science and engineering. We work with materials. We mix different elements to get new materials, or we mix plastics and metals, or plastics and ceramics, or metals and ceramics, and so on and so forth...

The thing about materials science is that a lot of the basic research can be done quite easily in the laboratory. Someone is studying, say, nickel alloys and corrosion resistance. She (yes, there are plenty of female engineers) might decide to add, say, vanadium to nickel progressively and see the effect on hardness and corrosion resistance.

So maybe one pellet is all nickel, and the next pellet is 99 percent nickel and 1 percent vanadium, and the next is 2 percent vanadium and she heats them all up in a furnace at 1000 degrees Celcius for two days and studies the results.

The point is that in this scenario, and in many other materials and chemistry and electrical engineering scenarios, it is pretty easy to control variables.  You make everything the same except ONE variable, and you can be pretty sure that any changes in the results are directly caused by the variable. (Even then  you have to be careful because sometimes there is some rogue problem, like a furnace misbehaving.)

Now let us think about climate science.

Wow.

Talk about complicated!  A whole WORLD! Whose heat is from the SUN, which also changes. Did you know that Jupiter actually effects earth's orbit a bit?

Sunspot activity is another factor.

If you look into history, the world has experienced similarly warm temperatures to now. There was a Medieval Warm Period from about 950 AD to 1250 AD. During that time, Greenland was so warm, so free of ice, that it was possible to grow barley and corn on Greenland!

Obviously CO2 from humans wasn't a problem back then!

Then came the little ice age, and Greenland got colder, and people couldn't farm much there.

So obviously the earth has gone through great shifts in climate even in the last two thousand years.

Did you know that in the last couple of decades, the ice sheet in Antarctica has expanded?

Anyway, my point is this. Climate is INCREDIBLY complicated. People try to pin increasing temperatures on CO2, and furthermore claim that the CO2 made by PEOPLE is causing warming.

I say that the data is NOT there. There are too many variables.

Not to say that we should not TRY to figure it out. When you can't control all the variables, you can still do models and that kind of thing.

But the global warming alarmists are, truthfully, faking evidence, and that is not Ok.

Look up the famous hockey stick graph promulgated by Penn State professor Michael Mann.

The dude seriously messed with the data to make it look the way it does.

I mean, he faked it.

He totally ignored the Medieval Warm Period, where temps were hotter than they are now.

You... can't do that. I mean, you can. He did. His work had an incredible amount of influence on the decisions of a great many councils and governments.

And he FAKED THE DATA.

Outrageous.

The truth is, we as humans are probably affecting the climate. I mean, we are building skyscrapers and putting down pavement. 

But why is it CO2 we are obsessing about?  There are so many other possible variables. And frankly, there is zero raw data that rising CO2 levels are causing rising temperatures. Because people keep fudging the data in various nefarious ways.

So yeah, I am not worried about it at all.

And I am really annoyed at scientists who are putting ideology and money over true science.

Having said that, I get it. You don't get money from governments by saying, "Oh, we are worried that rising CO2 levels MIGHT impact temperature so we want to study it."

No, you say, "The world will end soon if we don't stop CO2 levels rising! Give us money!"

It is the way of the world. Sadly.