Oh look, a soapbox.
Apr. 23rd, 2007 08:15 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cherryAl Gore is a rock star. Seriously.
Couple of places he said things that jerked me out of the presentation, just because they're things that you really don't hear in Canada much -- religious references, a mention of "the evil of communism": hello, and welcome to Saskatchewan, land of medicare, co-ops, and credit unions.
Gore obvious cares deeply, and An Inconvenient Truth has been incredibly effective at bringing some sense of the scope of the issue of climate change to the masses.
I don't talk too terribly much about politics in this journal. I'm aware that my beliefs are not those of others, and that my academic background and social backgrounds have given me rather strong predispositions on a number of issues. Climate change, however, happens to be one of my hot-button issues. Climate change, global poverty reduction, and social equality, but I digress.
I had to write a neutral paper on climate change earlier in the year. It was difficult not because of my personal bias, but because I decided early on to limit myself to scientific papers -- to peer reviewed journal articles. For those not familiar with the process, it basically means that a group of academic peers have refereed the paper, and that it is reliable.
This became a problem, because there are no peer reviewed articles that dispute human influence on climate change. There was a paper in Nature (Oreskes, 2004) which surveyed almost a thousand (928, to be precise) abstracts in the ISI database with the keyword "climate change." Of these, 75% expressly or implicitly endorsed what has become the scientific consensus amongst those whose expertise is relevant: climate change has been directly, and dramatically, impacted by human involvement. The debate is in the media.
No one is saying that Milankovitch cycles aren't real, or that rotational wobble and axial tilt don't influence climate. 600,000 years of ice cores, however, say that there has never been as great an increase in temperature in as short of time. 600,000 years of ice cores shows a correlational relationship between CO2 and temperature. While this relationship between greenhouse gases and climate change is defined as correlational and not causational, the same is true of smoking and cancer -- and to ignore either would be incredibly foolhardy.
/soapbox
Oooh, and the lovely![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
sprat vgifted me with a planted tree! Yay! Thank you, hon.
Couple of places he said things that jerked me out of the presentation, just because they're things that you really don't hear in Canada much -- religious references, a mention of "the evil of communism": hello, and welcome to Saskatchewan, land of medicare, co-ops, and credit unions.
Gore obvious cares deeply, and An Inconvenient Truth has been incredibly effective at bringing some sense of the scope of the issue of climate change to the masses.
I don't talk too terribly much about politics in this journal. I'm aware that my beliefs are not those of others, and that my academic background and social backgrounds have given me rather strong predispositions on a number of issues. Climate change, however, happens to be one of my hot-button issues. Climate change, global poverty reduction, and social equality, but I digress.
I had to write a neutral paper on climate change earlier in the year. It was difficult not because of my personal bias, but because I decided early on to limit myself to scientific papers -- to peer reviewed journal articles. For those not familiar with the process, it basically means that a group of academic peers have refereed the paper, and that it is reliable.
This became a problem, because there are no peer reviewed articles that dispute human influence on climate change. There was a paper in Nature (Oreskes, 2004) which surveyed almost a thousand (928, to be precise) abstracts in the ISI database with the keyword "climate change." Of these, 75% expressly or implicitly endorsed what has become the scientific consensus amongst those whose expertise is relevant: climate change has been directly, and dramatically, impacted by human involvement. The debate is in the media.
No one is saying that Milankovitch cycles aren't real, or that rotational wobble and axial tilt don't influence climate. 600,000 years of ice cores, however, say that there has never been as great an increase in temperature in as short of time. 600,000 years of ice cores shows a correlational relationship between CO2 and temperature. While this relationship between greenhouse gases and climate change is defined as correlational and not causational, the same is true of smoking and cancer -- and to ignore either would be incredibly foolhardy.
/soapbox
Oooh, and the lovely
sprat vgifted me with a planted tree! Yay! Thank you, hon.