One of the most common defenses against global warming is to use discrepencies in the conclusions of published papers and say that "well, if they can't agree, then it must not be true". What the skeptics don't realize is that there's a big difference in the conclusions of a paper written on Southern Alaska and one written on Northern Greenland. There's also the problem of scientists talking about additional research that can be done next within their conclusions without accurately saying why they didn't do what they think should be done next--because they ran out of funding or need more assistants. But anyway, I'm not here to complain about public misunderstandings of scientific papers. I'm going to propose a simple example that might help you understand why global warming is complicated and why you should be leery whenever someone proposes "scientific proof" that global warming is fake.
The world is a complicated place. Depending on the specific characteristics of a location, the way that location responds to changes will be different. Picture, for instance, a study of 20 different people. These people include men, women, children, the elderly, Asians, Africans, South Americans, Europeans, the disabled, the average, the health nuts, tall people, short people, "smart" people, "dumb" people, and any other number of other differences associated with the human genome. Now, lets take our experimental group and let's increase the temperature. The old and the young might be the first to drop out--unable to withstand extremely elevated temperatures (you know you've heard about the warnings during heat waves). The South Americans and Australians of the healthy variety will probably be able to survive the longest. Or, let's fill the room with excess CO2 and see who can best survive the pollution. Not enough water? Too much radiation? Etc. Why the discrepancies?
No one would question a study that concluded that different people respond differently to different stimuli (well, actually, I think they do, but that's a different story), so why are there so many complaints when envirionmental scientists say that depending on where you are in the world the affects will be different?
Actually, my next area of study on this topic will be to figure out why so much of the public is convinced that we're actually in a state of global cooling. No scientists agrees with this.
The world is a complicated place. Depending on the specific characteristics of a location, the way that location responds to changes will be different. Picture, for instance, a study of 20 different people. These people include men, women, children, the elderly, Asians, Africans, South Americans, Europeans, the disabled, the average, the health nuts, tall people, short people, "smart" people, "dumb" people, and any other number of other differences associated with the human genome. Now, lets take our experimental group and let's increase the temperature. The old and the young might be the first to drop out--unable to withstand extremely elevated temperatures (you know you've heard about the warnings during heat waves). The South Americans and Australians of the healthy variety will probably be able to survive the longest. Or, let's fill the room with excess CO2 and see who can best survive the pollution. Not enough water? Too much radiation? Etc. Why the discrepancies?
No one would question a study that concluded that different people respond differently to different stimuli (well, actually, I think they do, but that's a different story), so why are there so many complaints when envirionmental scientists say that depending on where you are in the world the affects will be different?
Actually, my next area of study on this topic will be to figure out why so much of the public is convinced that we're actually in a state of global cooling. No scientists agrees with this.
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