Sunday, March 21, 2010

Global Warming

Read this bit on Global Warming today that made me laugh...

"The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) said in December that 2000-2009 was the hottest decade since records began in 1850"

Wow, there's only a 1/16 chance of that happening randomly...now if the second hottest was 1990-1999, third hottest was 1980-1989, we might have a trend. "Fooled by Randomness"

In the same blog post... "'Last November was the hottest November we’ve ever seen, November-January as a whole is the hottest November-January the world has seen,' he said of the satellite data record since 1979."

A little better odds of that being relevant... 1/30, but it still makes you wonder if anyone is capable of rational thought on this subject any more, or if everyone has just made up their minds and decided to shout at one another in perpetuity.

It is obvious that humans are having an effect on the environment. I've been to Beijing, Los Angeles and West Virginia and tried to breathe, but that's what we should be trying to fix, the real problems. For the "Skpetics" to claim that we are not having a significant effect is to deny reality. On the other hand, for the warmers to claim that all human progress is leading to warming also seems insane. I am also not convinced that warming is all bad, it seems like it would make more arable land in the world. Farm Canada. Also, the solutions bandied about are all so anti-progress and complex. The last chapter of Freakonomics is a much more likely path to success, if more serious problems develop.

Current positions (subject to continuous change):

  • Cap and Trade is an Enron-like scam, in fact, they both had some guy named Paul Krugman pushing it. A Pigovian carbon tax is a better option.
  • The air sucks in a lot of places, and we should do what we can to avoid that, as long as the costs do not exceed the benefits.
  • We should plant more plants, apparently they can turn carbon dioxide into oxygen
  • We may reach a point where there is a non-optimal number of people on Earth. I have a list of nominations for those we can eliminate, in case we have too many.
  • People who claim to know exactly what is going on do not.

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