Be a
responsible citizen of the world, and educate
yourself about Global Warming, which is by far the
gravest threat facing our planet today.
Here’s how:
- Read
a short PowerPoint presentation that I
recently put together to summarize some of the major scientific facts
about global warming.
- Watch
“An Inconvenient Truth,” Al
Gore’s accessible documentary.
It’s not mere politicking, it’s a discussion of deep moral and
ethical issues that we all should care about. Whatever your party affiliation is, you
owe it to yourself and to future generations to see this movie.
- For
a look at just how dire the consequences of uncontrolled global warming
might be, even beyond what IPCC and Al Gore have pointed out, I also
recommend the Scientific American
article, “Impact
from the Deep,” by Peter Ward (Oct. 2006), which describes compelling
paleogeological evidence that some of the
greatest mass extinctions in the history of the Earth (ones which wiped
out the great majority of the species then living!) were caused not by
asteroid impacts, but by high CO2 levels and runaway global
warming, which killed most ocean life through deoxygenation
and acidification (which is already starting to occur a small scale in
dead zones, Red Tides and so forth), after which anaerobic bacteria in
the decaying oceans spewed out massive quantities of poisonous H2S
(hydrogen sulfide) gas, which then killed most land-based life as well. Earth appears to be on the path to
another very similar mass extinction event happening in the
not-too-distant future, if we don’t act aggressively, and very soon, to
stop it.
- Virtually
all of the world’s most highly-credentialed, widely-respected climate
experts now agree that global
warming is human-caused,
and that it will continue to worsen dramatically in coming decades if
aggressive steps are not taken to reduce CO2 emissions
starting now. Right-wing media types, many of
them likely motivated by ties with selfish special interests such as oil
companies, have often falsely exaggerated the extent of the scientific
controversy surrounding this issue, which is in fact virtually nil, among
reputable scientists with appropriate credentials. In fact, the majority (and today almost
unanimous) opinion of the climate-science community throughout at least the
last 20 years has been that the effects of human activity have indeed
been the dominant cause of the warming that we are seeing. But, don’t take my word for it! Here’s how you can PROVE TO YOURSELF, in a few simple steps, that the
manipulative and socially-irresponsible right wing spinmeisters
have been lying to you, and everyone else, about the scientific facts on
global warming for the last 20 years:
- Google
“climatology journals.” As of
2/4/07, the first link was this
list of journals. You may
find others as well. Gather all
the journal titles you can find.
You can also search for titles in other relevant subjects such as
meteorology, atmospheric science, planetary science, oceanography,
ecology, paleoclimatology, climate modeling,
etc. You may also want to include
in your list some of the most highly-ranked general science journals
such as Science, Nature, and Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
- Google
“journal impact factors.” You’ll
find a number of lists, such as this one, tabulating a
measure of which journals are most widely-cited (this is an approximate
measure of which journals are most well-reputed in the scientific community). Rank your climatology journals by
their impact factor.
- Go
to your university library’s online catalog (here’s FSU’s),
and search the catalog for some of the top-ranked climatology
journals. Most of the well-ranked
research universities (and US News
& World Report maintains the most widely-used lists of these)
will subscribe to the print and/or electronic versions of most of the
top journals. If your university
subscribes to the electronic version, and you are connecting from a
computer on-campus or through the library’s proxy server, the catalog
should give you a link via which you can directly download the full text
of the journal’s articles in PDF format from the journal’s website. Otherwise, to get the full text you
will have to go to the library and physically pull the volume from the
stacks of bound periodicals and photocopy the article. If you don’t have access to a
university library nearby, the reference librarian at your city’s public
library may still be able to request articles from a nearby university
library for you, via inter-library loan.
- Repeat
the following steps, until you are convinced: Pick any random year since 1985 or
so. (You will find the most agreement
on this question in the most recent years.) Go through the table of contents of
that journal’s articles for that year.
Look for titles that look like they might be addressing the
issues of global warming or climate change in some way. Download and read through the
article. Does the article claim
to provide clear evidence that global warming is not human-caused? Or
to the contrary, does it cite or claim to provide evidence that global
warming is human-caused? Or does it simply state or assume that
global warming is human caused, as if it is a background fact that
everyone already knows? More
likely than not, especially in articles printed since 2000 or so, it
will be one of the latter. Most
good academic articles will provide citations to supporting references
for their major background assumptions (at least for the assumptions
that are still controversial).
Follow the article’s references and read some of these background
articles to find the original evidence that the article’s assumptions
are based on.
- If
you somehow are able to find an article in a well-reputed climatology
journal that appears to provide evidence that recent global warming is not human caused, you can do
several things (beyond carefully reading it yourself) to sanity-check
it:
(a) First,
use Google Scholar or Web of
Knowledge to look for other articles that cite that article. If there are none, this suggests that nobody
else in the scientific community thought that the original article was even
worth gracing with a response. If there
are other articles that cite the article, then read them and see, do any of them
point out errors in the article’s reasoning or interpretation of data, or do
they point out contradictory evidence?
Can you find any other articles written by independent groups that seem
to confirm the data reported by the original article? If the data reported in the original article
has not been independently replicated by other groups, then its validity may be
suspect.
(b) Another
good idea is to check the authors’ credentials; in other words, look at their
biography and/or curriculum vita (a
long academic resume). You can often
find these through the researcher’s personal or department-posted web page at
their home university. Look over the
researcher’s background. Is he/she
employed at a highly-ranked academic department in a relevant field? Was he/she educated in a highly-ranked department
in a relevant field? Has he/she had a
large number of journal publications in well-ranked journals in climatology or
a relevant field, and has he/she presented numerous talks at well-respected
climatology conferences? If the answers
to most of these questions are yes, then the person is more likely to be an
authority whose findings and opinions are worthy of respect.
(c) See
if you can determine which organizations funded the person’s research. There have been a number of cases that have
come out in recent years where it turned out that some of the most vocal global
warming skeptics actually had their “research” bankrolled by special interests
– most notably oil companies - who had something to gain by confusing the
public about the scientific facts regarding global warming. This is very reminiscent to the way that
tobacco companies tried for years to confuse the public about the link between
smoking and lung cancer. (And in my
opinion, it is no less criminal… Big Oil
should be fined or sued for multi-billions of dollars in a class action lawsuit
representing all the people of Earth.)
After going through the above
process, you will see for yourself that all or nearly all of the most
respectable, well-credentialed climatology researchers (and whose work is
widely cited, replicated by others, and not clearly refuted) do now agree with
each other, either explicitly or through implicit assent, that the vast
majority of the global warming we have seen over the last 50 years has been
primarily caused by mankind’s CO2 emissions. As you go through the academic literature,
besides just seeing who agrees and who doesn’t, you can also look at the actual
data for yourself, and read and evaluate for yourself the scientific arguments
supporting this conclusion. I think that
any rational, reasonable person who looks at the evidence objectively, with an
open mind, and without a prejudged mindset of unthinking (fear-fed?) denial
(and who lacks an ulterior motive) would come to the same conclusion as the
leading climate researchers, namely this:
WE
ARE CAUSING GLOBAL WARMING, AND ONLY WE CAN STOP IT.