"Global warming" has been around as long as there's been an atmosphere.
If you're referring to warming caused by *humans* then it's been around at least since the Industrial Revolution kicked off in the late 18th century. This was counterbalanced somewhat by what climatologists call the "Little Ice Age" (or the latest thereof), which ended around 1850.
But naturally-occurring global warming has always been with us thanks to cyclical changes in the Earth. The Jurassic period was, in all likelihood, warmer than we are now, for example. There is also evidence to suggest that the ancient Mediterranean world, from Mycenean Greece through the Roman Empire, was also a warmer clime than the current residents enjoy.
As for politicizing, there's a lot of that going on at both ends of the scientific theory spectrum. One of the worst offenders is the UN's IPCC, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which first caused a major flap in their 1995 report by rewriting the scientists' findings (by one Dr. Benjamin Santer) to exaggerate the dangers, but leaving those scientists' names on the report. In Chapter 8 of said report, those scientists specifically said that their projections were models, and that we didn't know enough about global climate to make any certain predictions; but Dr. Santer altered or eliminated any passages that cast doubt on the conclusions the IPCC was forwarding.
More recently, their 2000 report not only altered its own findings to portray Antarctic ice cores they sampled as being 95 years younger than they were (thus "increasing" their carbon dioxide content) and ignored the "Urban Heat Island Effect"--the established fact that the air around cities generally is warmer--but they also based their projections based on a uniform planetwide model of warming--even though there is little evidence to suggest a warming trend in the Southern Hemisphere.
There's an old saying that goes "We may not want to get the kind of government we want, but we always get the kind of government we deserve." This applies to industry and journalism as well.
As much as I would like to spend part of this message bashing Microsoft, it really would be hypocritical of me. I would be writing my diatribe at work on a computer loaded to the fans with MS software, including the browser I'm using to read Slashdot today. Although my e-mail and homepage are based on a Linux server, most of my home computer is laden with the same MS products. So who am I (are we) to talk?
On the same hand, how much talking about Enron can we do in good faith? Many of the Enron employees lost their life savings because most or all of their retirements were tied up with Enron stock. For those of us who have bothered saving money (and I don't have a lot in savings either, so I'm forced to recuse myself from much Enron criticism), doing so intelligently doesn't mean going for something that looks like it'll make you a Lotta Money Quick. As quite a few people in and out of Enron have discovered, you can lose it just as fast.
(Is this "blaming the victims?" Yes it is, at least to some extent. It wasn't their fault that the Enron execs were scheisters. It *is* their fault if they were stupid investors, however.)
So then we come to the politicians, but don't expect much there. 71 of the current 100 senators, including Tom Daschle, received contributions from Enron. Discussions of campaign finance reform are good fodder for election years and are forgotten shortly afterwards after the politicians tally up the donors who helped them win their place on Capitol Hill.
And once again, we elected 'em, folks. We can talk all we want about accountability, but WE are the ones who need to hold them accountable. Yet that takes a lot of time and trouble, and not a lot of people are willing to put out the effort. Heck, tens of millions of adults in this country didn't even make the effort to vote in the 2000 election.
Finally, we have the media. And how much do we trust them? Too much, when we don't hold accountable people like the NY Times' economic columnist Paul Krugman. Krugman has spent months now flaying Bush alive for his connections with Enron and has beaten a venomous anti-Enron drum ever since the bankruptcy, while only recently being forced to acknowledge (after this was revealed by his own paper) that he himself got $50K from Enron in 1999 for serving on their advisory board. A board where, by his own admission, he did absolutely nothing. Krugman has stated several times that he sees no hypocrisy in this.
Is it really too much trouble for us to hold these people accountable? Or are we more afraid that in holding light up to them we'll blind ourselves? We may not want these people controlling our lives, but ultimately they may be who a lot of us deserve.
I have one Creationist textbook in my library (mainly only one because it's the only one I've found so far). It was an interesting blend of accepted scientific fact and Biblical premises, very often with chapters accompanied by Scriptural verse. Unknown quantities were usually explained along the lines of "We don't know how this happens, but certainly it is by the will of Jesus Christ that it occurs."
At which point I realized that scientists who engage in debates such as the ones we've been talking about here are often themselves to blame for appearing to "lose". Science is, at its heart, about the discovery of the unknown, but many scientists won't admit to the fact that they don't know something, or may not be certain. I'm not sure exactly why this is, although it could simply be that many of their audiences in the past couldn't stand or handle uncertaintly and assumed that if a scientist admits to ignorance on anything in his (or any other) discipline, he or she must be a poor scientist.
I've also seen debates where the "religious side" assumes it already knows everything; and therefore since scientists still have so many unknowns, they think that science itself is fatally flawed. Science doesn't work that way, though some religious believers do. If one part of the belief system comes into question their whole belief system may fall apart, and thus they transfer that illusional fragility to science.
So while we're on the subject...anyone ever read *Rock of Ages* by Stephen Jay Gould?
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"Global warming" has been around as long as there's been an atmosphere.
If you're referring to warming caused by *humans* then it's been around at least since the Industrial Revolution kicked off in the late 18th century. This was counterbalanced somewhat by what climatologists call the "Little Ice Age" (or the latest thereof), which ended around 1850.
But naturally-occurring global warming has always been with us thanks to cyclical changes in the Earth. The Jurassic period was, in all likelihood, warmer than we are now, for example. There is also evidence to suggest that the ancient Mediterranean world, from Mycenean Greece through the Roman Empire, was also a warmer clime than the current residents enjoy.
As for politicizing, there's a lot of that going on at both ends of the scientific theory spectrum. One of the worst offenders is the UN's IPCC, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which first caused a major flap in their 1995 report by rewriting the scientists' findings (by one Dr. Benjamin Santer) to exaggerate the dangers, but leaving those scientists' names on the report. In Chapter 8 of said report, those scientists specifically said that their projections were models, and that we didn't know enough about global climate to make any certain predictions; but Dr. Santer altered or eliminated any passages that cast doubt on the conclusions the IPCC was forwarding.
More recently, their 2000 report not only altered its own findings to portray Antarctic ice cores they sampled as being 95 years younger than they were (thus "increasing" their carbon dioxide content) and ignored the "Urban Heat Island Effect"--the established fact that the air around cities generally is warmer--but they also based their projections based on a uniform planetwide model of warming--even though there is little evidence to suggest a warming trend in the Southern Hemisphere.
There's an old saying that goes "We may not want to get the kind of government we want, but we always get the kind of government we deserve." This applies to industry and journalism as well. As much as I would like to spend part of this message bashing Microsoft, it really would be hypocritical of me. I would be writing my diatribe at work on a computer loaded to the fans with MS software, including the browser I'm using to read Slashdot today. Although my e-mail and homepage are based on a Linux server, most of my home computer is laden with the same MS products. So who am I (are we) to talk? On the same hand, how much talking about Enron can we do in good faith? Many of the Enron employees lost their life savings because most or all of their retirements were tied up with Enron stock. For those of us who have bothered saving money (and I don't have a lot in savings either, so I'm forced to recuse myself from much Enron criticism), doing so intelligently doesn't mean going for something that looks like it'll make you a Lotta Money Quick. As quite a few people in and out of Enron have discovered, you can lose it just as fast. (Is this "blaming the victims?" Yes it is, at least to some extent. It wasn't their fault that the Enron execs were scheisters. It *is* their fault if they were stupid investors, however.) So then we come to the politicians, but don't expect much there. 71 of the current 100 senators, including Tom Daschle, received contributions from Enron. Discussions of campaign finance reform are good fodder for election years and are forgotten shortly afterwards after the politicians tally up the donors who helped them win their place on Capitol Hill. And once again, we elected 'em, folks. We can talk all we want about accountability, but WE are the ones who need to hold them accountable. Yet that takes a lot of time and trouble, and not a lot of people are willing to put out the effort. Heck, tens of millions of adults in this country didn't even make the effort to vote in the 2000 election. Finally, we have the media. And how much do we trust them? Too much, when we don't hold accountable people like the NY Times' economic columnist Paul Krugman. Krugman has spent months now flaying Bush alive for his connections with Enron and has beaten a venomous anti-Enron drum ever since the bankruptcy, while only recently being forced to acknowledge (after this was revealed by his own paper) that he himself got $50K from Enron in 1999 for serving on their advisory board. A board where, by his own admission, he did absolutely nothing. Krugman has stated several times that he sees no hypocrisy in this. Is it really too much trouble for us to hold these people accountable? Or are we more afraid that in holding light up to them we'll blind ourselves? We may not want these people controlling our lives, but ultimately they may be who a lot of us deserve.
I have one Creationist textbook in my library (mainly only one because it's the only one I've found so far). It was an interesting blend of accepted scientific fact and Biblical premises, very often with chapters accompanied by Scriptural verse. Unknown quantities were usually explained along the lines of "We don't know how this happens, but certainly it is by the will of Jesus Christ that it occurs."
At which point I realized that scientists who engage in debates such as the ones we've been talking about here are often themselves to blame for appearing to "lose". Science is, at its heart, about the discovery of the unknown, but many scientists won't admit to the fact that they don't know something, or may not be certain. I'm not sure exactly why this is, although it could simply be that many of their audiences in the past couldn't stand or handle uncertaintly and assumed that if a scientist admits to ignorance on anything in his (or any other) discipline, he or she must be a poor scientist.
I've also seen debates where the "religious side" assumes it already knows everything; and therefore since scientists still have so many unknowns, they think that science itself is fatally flawed. Science doesn't work that way, though some religious believers do. If one part of the belief system comes into question their whole belief system may fall apart, and thus they transfer that illusional fragility to science.
So while we're on the subject...anyone ever read *Rock of Ages* by Stephen Jay Gould?