Yesterday, at the GIS Day 2008, Cameron Wake gave the keynote speech on the topic of ‘Climate Change in the Northeast’. Professor Wake is a distinguished researcher in the field of climate change at UNH.

Since GIS Day is an event geared towards elementary and high school students, Wake urged the millennium generation to talk to their parents about climate change and to educate themselves on the topic. His lectures are always very interesting with fascinating, eye-opening graphs.

The image above shows the increase in the amount of CO2 in Earth’s atmosphere in the last 50 years. All significant scientific research shows that today’s climate change is largely influenced by humans. At the end of the lecture I asked professor Wake what could be the motivation of those people who do not want to accept climate change to be caused by man, against all the scientific results. He answered, that those people might have ideological reasons for doing so, since all research data shows otherwise.

Oszkar

For more go to www.wecansolveit.org.

Andrew Kun

Ralph Cicerone is the president of the National Academy of Sciences. On Friday, October 19, 2007, he was at UNH talking about global climate change and its human causes. Here is a picture from the talk:

The webcast of this excellent hour-long talk will be available (along with the slides) here. In this post I wanted to address only one of Dr. Cicerone’s points. He discussed the idea some people advance, that we don’t need to combat global climate change since there may be winners as well as losers, and perhaps we (however that is defined) will actually be winners. Dr. Cicerone disagreed, pointing out that we do not know what the outcome of unchecked climate change would be, thus it’s hard to predict who may benefit. We do know however, that significant disruptions would result from it. One simple example: due to rising ocean water levels parts of many coastal population centers would end up under water. For me the takehome message was this: claiming that inaction is a reasonable course of action, based on predictions of supposed winning outcomes for some regions or species, is irresponsible at best.

Andrew Kun

Yesterday I received a petition in the mail from the so-called Petition Project. The petition actually says this:

“… there is substantial scientific evidence that increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide produce many beneficial effects upon the natural plant and animal environments of the Earth.”

Seriously… Stop the nonsense!

The petition came with a reprint of a paper that looks like it would be from a respectable scientific publication. However, it is from the Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons. Now, you may ask yourself, wouldn’t this be a publication that discusses new approaches to surgery, or something like that? Why would they have a paper on CO2 in the atmosphere? And who of their reviewers (presumably physicians and surgeons) is qualified to provide a peer review of such a paper? Then you look at the content of the Fall 2007 issue of the publication and you see that they discuss the connection between breast cancer and abortion (regardless of your ethical views on abortion, the National Cancer Institute says there’s no connection), liberalism as a mental disorder (perhaps an entertaining read, but unlikely to be scientific) and government spending vs. private health care (is this an economics journal?). This choice of topics of course gives you the distinct impression that you’re not looking at a scientific publication but one that’s intended to provide cover for political purposes (e.g. for people who would like to make money selling fosil fuels without taking responsibility for the environmental effects of burning those fuels).

Btw, around 2000 this same petition was circulated with a paper written in the style of a paper to appear in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, even though it was not accepted for publication in the proceedings (of course).

What a joke! Anyway, read more here. Perhaps the only good thing: even ideologues feel that they need to use science to win arguments. Now they just need to start practicing the real thing.

Andrew Kun

Have you heard the argument that solar palens take more energy to manufacture than they can actually produce during their useful lives? Here is an article that takes on this argument and shows that it’s wrong. Go solar panels!

Andrew Kun

So is this guy.