Lurkette – For now lets ignore global warming, I’ll go into some details on that in a later post. Lets just look at the claim of
Quote:
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This is the most rapid warming this planet has experienced for at least 4 million years and possible the fastest warming in the last 20 million.
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Now that sounds scary. Its one thing if it was the hottest year of the century, or the fastest warming in 1000 years but in 4 MILLION years and maybe 20 MILLION years, it MUST be bad right? Well I’m afraid its nothing but scare mongering to worry people like yourself about global warming. One of the ploys of the environmentalist extremists is that they don’t trust a non-scientist to come up with the right conclusions on their own. If they said something like “There is a slight warming trend which we have noticed and we are concerned that it may be due to human actives” they don’t get on the news, people don’t vote differently, and they don’t get funding. Instead they count on you not understanding the science involved and scream ‘the sky is falling’ or in this case ‘fastest warming trend in 4 million years’. The problem is they are lying/bending the truth and know it.
There are several ways to date ancient materials. There is carbon 14 dating, which uses the half life of radioactive carbon (5700 years I think) to date organic material. Its based on the assumption of the level of radioactive carbon something accumulated while alive, and then checks that to how much is left. Based on the half life you can get an pretty accurate date, but it only works for material less then 70,000 years old. This of course won’t work for fossils since they are older and no longer organic. In the case of fossils other isotopes are used such as potassium/argon, or uranium/lead to date the material. This is a very good dating method, and has about 1% error but there are two problems with it. The first is that it only works from a point when the material was fossilized, and how long this takes is open to debate. If you assume a constant rate of fossilization (and I’m not sure you can) then this problem isn’t that big an issue, because ALL of your dates will be off by the same amount and in geologic time, not that far. The other real problem is that 1% error. For scientific studies like evolution, this isn’t a problem (though if you are familiar with the idea of punctuated evolution it might be), 1% error is minor. On the other hand lets take a look at it from the concept of climate.
It is VERY difficult to know the year to year temperatures before the late 1800’s since there were not good, consistent measurements. All information comes from reports, agriculture figures, etc, but has no useful numbers. Rather recently deep ice cores were taken from Greenland and the Antarctic which gave a pretty good picture but that can come in a post about global warming, (this is not a post about global warming but scientific dishonesty). Now lets look at that 1% error and the 4 million year warming claim. 1% of 4 million is 40,000 years. In terms of climate change that’s HUGE. You can tell generally if temperatures were warmer or colder, and if the trend was warming or cooling, based on what kind of plant life is found in these layers but there is no way you could tell how fast a change took place. At the same time you would need to consider continental drift as you are talking enough time that the movement of the continents would make a difference in ‘local’ temperatures, and you could generally tell CO2 levels based on the density of plant material, and perhaps CO2 concentrations calcium carbonate layers, but there is no way you could tell how fast a warming trend happened some 4 million years ago even if it took place over night.
While there was a global
COOLING period from 1945-1979 (leading to scares of future famine and even an ice age), there has been a rise in temperatures from 1980-2003. This is hardly surprising since we are just coming out of a global cooling period of several centuries and the current temperatures are LOWER then were seen in AD 1200.
In conclusion, while claims of ‘the fastest warming in 4 million years’ sound good to those who don’t’ know the science, they are laughable to anyone who looks at these things objectively. I hope you realize that I am not out to see the planet screwed up, and I do wish to lower pollution levels, but I can not do so while being scientifically dishonest as so many in the global warming crowd are.