One of the big topics of the upcoming election season is going to be global warming. Almost everyone in the race will say that it is a real phenomenon caused by man, and they will almost all say that they have the right plan for how to handle it. I'm still not convinced that global warming is anything more than a political scare tactic that benefits radical, tree-hugging organization like Greenpeace. Take this article for instance:
Apparently, some scientists (the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) predicted that the area of the Arctic Sea covered by ice would shrink to about 4.5 million square kilometers by 2050. Now, a different set of scientists (the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency) are observing the current coverage area of ice in the Arctic Sea and are forecasting that the coverage area will shrink to 4.5 million square kilometers by mid-September, 2007. I think most people are going to read this and assume the worst. We've screwed up our planet so bad that things are spiraling out of control at an alarming rate, and we might not be able to fix it.
I think that the IPCC, though, gets much closer to the truth. When asked about the predictions, they responded, "The IPCC forecast cannot adequately explain what is now happening in the Arctic Sea." Basically, they're saying, "We don't have a freakin' clue."
Personally, I think that about sums it up. They don't know. The scientists want you to believe that they know. They want you to think that they've got all the data and that they've got all the answers. But the truth is that they are just guessing and then using the data to test and see if their guesses are anywhere close to being correct. All this article proves to me is that not only can we not predict the weather for this weekend, but we can't do any better job of predicting the weather for the next decade.
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