More Truthiness: Climate Change

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Global Warming, Global Schmarming
See!? It’s SNOWING! Take that, Al Gore!!

When the East Coast got whacked by the biggest week of blizzards in a century this week (well, only the part of the East Coast that counts to the news media—D.C.), some commentators took the opportunity to crow that this was evidence that global warming is a fraud.

More! Yesterday (2/12), 49 of the 50 U.S. states had measurable snow on the ground (kudos if you can figure out which didn’t!)—up to 4-6 inches across the Deep South.

The two-part mid-Atlantic storm was so heavy that Baltimore had more snow so far this season—six feet!—than Buffalo, NY. Meanwhile, of course, the Winter Olympics in Vancouver, BC, struggles with trucking in enough snow for the mogul and Xtreme hills, and Utah (“Greatest Snow on Earth!”) is at 63 percent of normal snowpack, the weather moguls say, predicting another year of significant drought.

But never mind. Some media pundits used the East Coast blizzard as a way to poke the Obama administration and environmentalists over their “hysteria” about “alleged global warming.” See this clip from The Daily Show, in which Jon Stewart and friends showcase some of the climate change discussion. Many more conservative (whatever that means) politicians and media (like the Wall Street Journal) also took the storm as an opportunity to poo-poo science and political positions they dislike. See this link to “Media Matters for America” (a liberal—whatever that means—media watchdog group).

Closer to home, the Utah Legislature this week passed a formal resolution questioning whether global warming exists (and what about that Utah drought-y thingy?), leading scientists from that radical campus to the south (B-Y-U) to send a formal letter of protest and then to testify before a legislative hearing.

USU science Professor Will Popendorf writes: “Regarding the resolution, you may be aware that some faculty from BYU were involved in testimony to the legislature on this topic. . . . In addition, a group of their faculty initiated a letter response (see PDF at http://utahjwj.org/img/Legislature2.pdf). My understanding is that this letter is being supported by
faculty at the UofU.”

So, where does all that leave us? As normal humans with no particular position or expertise on this topic, how are we to respond to these kinds of strong statements from elected representatives and prominent news people? How can we make sense of these things? Certainly, we have seen the pictures of disappearing glaciers, and heard about declining stocks of fish that apparently can’t find food in warming oceans; and then there are those poor polar bears whose icebergs are melting. Al Gore won the Nobel Prize, fergoodnesssakes!, for his work on climate change, including “An Inconvenient Truth.” There’s got to be something to all that. But what about all these other people who also seem to know what they’re talking about?

How do we know what we think???

Dr. Ted
Perfesser of Confusing Things
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