As I kid I liked to get up early with Grandma and sit with her in the kitchen while she cooked breakfast. She'd give me coffee, southern-style -- thin, sweet and creamy. It was a treat because it was so wrong. Coffee, as any medical professional could have explained at the time, stunted your growth. Breakfast, by the way, was always the same; sausage and bacon with eggs, biscuits and gravy. My grandparents lived into their eighties and nineties respectively in daily defiance of scientific wisdom.
I grew at a reasonable pace.
You can still find medical websites repeating the advice that gave rise to the 'stunt your growth' myth. Coffee drinking was once believed to cause calcium deficiency and bone loss, a tie that is generally discounted now. Rummage through your pantry or refrigerator and you'll find a whole host of items that might be regarded as either a superfood or a health threat, depending on the results of the latest study. Butter, margarine, wine, chocolate, eggs, bread, potatoes, any of them have been shunned or prized at different times based on different research.
Our struggle to make well-informed food choices can shed light on the political challenge of climate change.
Science is a process we use to establish objective facts. Science takes a question like, "what is the airspeed velocity of an unladen swallow" and finds an answer through observation and repeatable experiments. While science is very good at answering a specific question like "how much fat is in this doughnut?" it has a harder time answering complex matrix questions like, "What should I eat?"
Whether this egg is a good choice for me for breakfast this morning depends on a galaxy of variables almost impossible to model adequately in an experiment. My genetic profile, the type of egg, how I cook it, what I ate yesterday or will eat today, my lifestyle, along with innumerable other factors affect the result.
The more variables that affect the outcome, the more difficult it is to construct a meaningful experiment. The farther you get from any experimental capability, the farther you get from reliable scientific results.
Climate science is a matrix of millions of factors interacting in ways that we scarcely understand. Determining how a change in one of those variables will affect the whole is no small challenge. Scientists have been able to build computer models that simulate historical climate patterns with some impressive accuracy, but that is not the same thing as having a genuine experimental capability.
Scientists have successfully established that the Earth's climate is warming. There is almost universal agreement that human carbon emissions represent a factor in that warming. Unfortunately, that is limit of what science has been able to establish with demonstrable precision at this point.
How much warming can we expect, precisely? When? How much of the warming is due to human carbon emissions? What else may be driving up temperatures? What, exactly, would a reduction in carbon emissions to say, 1990 levels, do to our climate if anything? What will warming mean, precisely, in five, eight, ten years to this particular glacier?
Fine research by outstanding scientific professionals has produced answers to these questions that are quite literally all over the map. We're learning how immature the entire field of climate science is and how difficult it is to accurately test their hypotheses.
Along the way we're being reminded that climate change is always occurring. The dramatic warming we've seen over the past century is not unprecedented. According to EPA and IPCC research, global temperatures remain relatively cool compared to their 5,000 year average. We're discovering new forces that shape our climate, like Criegee biradicals that may counter warming in ways we've yet to ascertain. Researchers cannot tell us with confidence that even the most radical proposals will actually bring down temperatures.
The complexities involved in matrix problems such as this help explain why our annual hurricane estimates are utterly useless, why you can't get an accurate weather forecast for next Thursday, and why no one can tell you with scientific precision what you should have for dinner tonight. You don't have to be a mental giant like Einstein, Hawking, or Rick Santorum to recognize that science, for all its value, has some weaknesses. Those weaknesses can be addressed with time and energy, but we have to factor them into present-tense decisions.
If the fix for climate change was as simple as changing a light bulb then the disagreements over these details might not matter much. However, we're being asked to undertake the wholesale re-engineering of the entire global political and economic order.
The left's giddy enthusiasm for climate change makes their position sound just as politically driven and scientifically suspect as Michele Bachmann's support for intelligent design. The solutions proposed by the left seem influenced less by science than by the desire to establish an economic order they have failed to achieve by other means. The competing climate freakouts on the extremes of the left and right are undermining everyone's efforts to formulate sensible policy.
Climate change is a scary prospect, but a highly ambiguous one. We should not undertake an expensive, wholesale economic re-engineering aimed solely at carbon reduction. While we work to understand the true scale, shape, and meaning of climate change we should embrace reforms with powerful secondary benefits, like fuel-efficient technologies, power grid improvements, and exploitation of strategically reliable fuel sources.
Building a vast global bureaucracy for monitoring and rationing carbon is an exceptionally bad idea that in the eyes of future generations is likely to make us look ridiculous. Worse than parachute pants.
Enjoy your coffee, chocolate, red wine and carbon dioxide in moderation and await further scientific bulletins.
Mairlyn Smith: Spring Clean Your Fridge
Please study some basic chemistry to understand the Greenhouse Gas efect.
An average horse will produce between 15 and 35 pounds of manure a day. So, before long, cities were literally being covered by horse manure, which attracted clouds of flies, sullied water supplies, and blew everywhere. By 1900, New York alone produced 2.5 million pounds of horse manure EVERY SINGLE DAY. Experts and mayors estimated that by the mid 1930's, the world's cities would be 9 feet deep in manure.
Everyone could see the problem. But businesses who made money from, and folks who relied on, horses, wailed against every suggestion to deal with it. It was too complex a problem! Any solution was too expensive! It would mean the end of cultures and economies! Civilization would grind to a halt!
Well, we know how that all ended.
Now, instead of horsepower, we use carbon fuels. And once again, the planet is filling with noxious offal as a result.
Instead of clinging to your horse cart and fears of change, maybe it's time you, and others like you, just took a more active interest in where need to go, and help get us there, effectively.
It's time to stop shoveling the s**t. It's plenty deep, already.
The thing is - it's precisely an expensive, wholesale economic re-engineering aimed solely at carbon production that got us to this point.
Thanks for the demonstration. Not that we needed one... we can see this every day on tv a hundred times. Also usually with the GOP label attached to it.
http://www.pbs.org/tradesecrets/docs/alarscarenegin.html
I realize it can be amusing to claim that nutrition science has given endlessly contradictory recommendations, and it's an interesting-enough device to lead in to the discussion of climate change, but it's really not true.
Had there been an entrenched industry in the early 1950s resisting this change, we would have heard the same bogus arguments about "overhauling our entire economy" or "spending trillions of dollars on unproven technology." But we did it, and people hardly noticed as it happened.
The flip side of cost is income. Spending to move away from a carbon economy will mean more money in the economy and more jobs. We can obviously do it. We've done similar things before.
First, this is the only planet we have.
We would avoid doing anything that has a 1% chance of killing our child. We would certainly avoid anything that has a 10% chance.
So why would we blithely continue business as usual if there is even a one percent chance that our increasing use of fossil fuels is causing the stronger storms, the longer droughts and the encroachment of insects on forests that have no natural defenses?
Shouldn't the proper question be: Are we 100% certain that we AREN'T doing irreparable harm to our one and only home?
Second, won't we eventually need to "undertake the wholesale re-engineering of the entire global political and economic order" anyway?
Twenty, fifty or eighty years from now the oil will run out. Wouldn't it be be smarter to start now and avoid the panic of oil shortages? If we start now won't we minimize the shock and pain of transition? Wouldn't it be better to reduce our trade deficit? Wouldn't it be better quit distorting our foreign policy and codling tyrants to keep the oil flowing?
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Hopefully, this time I've been able to guess what the #@!&#! moderators have decided to consider offensive today.
james watkins had a company that was demonstrating battery conversion kits for cars that were unbelievable.
i was so impressed that i tried for two months to contact him through the company
until i was informed that he was appointed by george h. bush as energy secretary and they closed down the battery manufacturing.
the technology has been available for quite some time.
the 1970s had some impressive government regulations for fuel efficiency.
the global warming debate stalled everything.
Scientists keep trying to prove climate change as being wrong and the feedback loops keeps confirming their experiments and research. Of course repubs never find anything odd in the fact that the USA is having 100 years storms every 5 years or so. Insurance industries are breaking records each year in payouts due to record number of fires and tornados. When the steering winds start pushing a few more hurricanes onto the east coast they'll be fueled by ever higher water temps and repubs will just shrug and say something about religion. And this is just in the US...
Climate change will offer no distinction between political parties and will affect all evenly. You can run but you cannot hide.
But I guess sticking our head in the sand will work....
To put the change in CO2 in perspective of your food analogy, consider a person who's diet includes 5000x the daily recommended level of iron. Now imagine that person is chronically ill, but apologists like this article point out that we don't know everything about food going into every part of a person's diet, so let's not be hasty in reducing the iron intake.
**If the fix for climate change was as simple as changing a light bulb then the disagreements over these details might not matter much. However, we're being asked to undertake the wholesale re-engineering of the entire global political and economic order. **
And:
**While we work to understand the true scale, shape, and meaning of climate change we should embrace reforms with powerful secondary benefits, like fuel-efficient technologies, power grid improvements, and exploitation of strategically reliable fuel sources. **
This is why our political culture destroys moderates.
Actually, seeing as Republicans in Congress are now fighting the light bulb bill originally written by a Republican, I'd say we'd have a fight even if it was as simple as changing a light bulb.
I suppose that advice is great if you are already in your 60s but if you are just being born, that advice could be fatal. By the time certainty arrives it will be likely way too late to mitigate the effects.
I wonder why so many prefer waiting instead of actively doing things to prevent it?
Perhaps it is the old adage those who can profit from 'pollution' or CO2 emissions will fight for their right to make a profit even if it cause collateral damage. Look at the tobacco industry for an example.
We can all infer that pollution of any kind can alter our world. We can also predict that managing that pollution will make our world more inhabitable.
Pretending that we can wait to choose is what for profit businesses promote.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/
We can do things that will make our planet more livable, our future more interesting, and our children thankful.