Wednesday, April 4, 2007

How warm does it have to get?

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Dr. Easterbrook continues to push the Republican Party line on global warming. The subject is important enough for me to author a brief reply to his reply of a week ago.

You want to talk about the politicization of geology? The Bush administration has instructed the Grand Canyon National Park service rangers not to discuss the age of the strata found there. To inform the public that 3.5-billion-year-old pre-Cambrian schist/gneiss can be found there is potentially offensive to fundamental Christians. Further, the visitor's center has to store a creationist text that claims the canyon was formed during Noah's time of the Great Flood. Good one.

I could flood this letter with numerical data about air and oceanic temperature stats, thermohaline circulation, anthropogenic forcing, ice core sample data, permafrost readings, the Keeling curve, albedo feedback loops, computer models, metric tonnage loads, ppms and more. But why? Most of us would rather watch grass grow, and also we can't evaluate the data's source, methods, or whether its cherry-picked or not.

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Dr. Easterbrook finds himself on the outside, looking in. Even with the Atlantic Monthly as his podium (I subscribe), he cannot take his case to the people. We're watching American Idol. He needs to take his case to his peers for review, and give Stephen Hawking a call while he's at it.

Bali Szabo

Hailey