RSS
Home
Cooling trend does not refute global warming
Print
Email
RSS
Subscribe
With the current Cap and Trade legislation pending in Congress many commentators have been presenting the argument that global temperatures have actually been cooling over the last ten (10) years and global warming is not really occurring. While I think that the Cap and Trade bill should not be passed, this argument of cooling temperatures is very misleading.
Let’s take a detailed look at the argument that temperatures are actually cooling. The temperature data from NOAA does show that the average temperature peaked in 1998 and each year since has been cooler than the 1998 peak. This does not, however, represent a cooling trend. Just take a look at the chart of the data. The moving average temperature has clearly been rising. The ‘cooling’ is simply temperatures that have not exceeded a one year spike.
The science behind global warming is very compelling. Greenhouse gases, most notably carbon dioxide, reflect heat back to the surface of the planet thereby slowly warming the planet. A lot of this warming is trapped by the oceans, which are slowly rising due to thermal expansion of the water.
The sea is a huge heat sink that averages temperature changes over the entire world. If the world was actually cooling, then sea levels should be going down. What we see is a continually rising trend. The black line on the chart from recent satellite data is very accurate.
The debate about global warming is being driven by the alarmists on one side and the deniers on the other side. The alarmists seem to want radical and immediate changes with no regard to the costs. The deniers don’t want to spend any money on remediation.
The truth is that global warming caused by man-made gases is real. It will have economic costs in the future. These costs will come from rising sea levels and local changes in climate that will cause changes in agriculture and habitat. The burning of fossil fuels also has health costs due to the release of harmful chemicals like mercury, oxides, uranium into our environment.
Global warming probably can’t be stopped, but we can mitigate the effects by reducing the amount of carbon dioxide we release into the atmosphere. It would be economically efficient to mitigate the amount of future damage by investing some amount of money now to produce more energy from clean, renewable sources. How much we should spend is a matter of debate. It is more than the zero amount the deniers want to spend and probably a lot less than the radicals want to spend.
Having a national program to build renewable energy now would be a start on solving the problem. This would allow us to create the infrastructure to build solar and wind systems on a large scale. In a few years time, we will have better scientific data to access where we stand and can then adjust the scale of our renewable energy development to meet our needs.
