What do I think, What can I do?

Archive for December, 2010

2010 in one figure

I wanted to make a kind of summary of this year, the first year for this blog. It started as a trial, and I still are not sure about my energy to write periodically about climate change. But some post have been produced and some more are in drafts, so fpor the moment I do not give up.

The most direct way to make a kind of summary in this moment was to obtain new data for my climagechangemeter and show them. October was a very encouraging month with steep increments for total appearances and decrements for sceptics. But today this result is going exactly the other way: Scepticism is regaining strength and climate change loosing presence. Anyway those results are weaker than the previous gains so, global output from june is clearly positive. Is this a real index about global opinion? I am not able to say it but considering the moderate success of Cancun and some interesting results as the failure of prop 21 in California we may be getting in the right way.  The more difficult question is, are we driving at sufficient speed?


Advertisement

Category:

Uncategorized

Tagged with:

Climate Change and Colesterol

My father used to get quite disappointed and a bit surprised when the cholesterol level considered dangerous was diminished. It happened at least twice in his last years. His point of view was quite logical, if I maintain the same cholesterol it can not be fair one day and too high the next one. The question was that maybe it was dangerous all the time but we did not have enough knowledge until the key researchs were developed and accepted.

Science goes in this way, there are not scientific absolute truths to be find in mysterious papers. Only hypothesis, measurements, data, checking, discussion, more hypothesis, data , measurements,.. and finally, after some time, several papers, strong debate and frequently arguments a general consensus about one theory. Latter, this can be surpassed by new more precise measurement, more refined theory,…

The climate data

Figure from last IPCC report. In my opinion the rising curves are quite clear, what do you think?

And in climate change there is a broad consensus among climatologists. The climate is changing due to our CO2 and Methane emissions. Many other issues are not so clear, for example the extent of the effects or the way to mitigate them. But the main fact is assumed by scientific community and denying it or taking partial data or particular opinions to make everyone doubt can be effective in the short term. And even credible for non-experts like me but it is irresponsible for humans in this time and more for our grandsons.

It is possible (not very probable) that some of our actual analysis change in the future, but we have to act with what we know now, because if we wait till everybody sees it clearly it might be too late. Anyhow it will be too late for many, our choice is to mitigate it for the rest.

Category:

Uncategorized