Environmental myths explored

I noticed on slashdot of a day or two ago (I am very behind) this article about global warming. It turns out that in the middle ages it was much warmer than it is now.

One day liberals will realize that they simply do not know what is happening to the environment. When I was very young (and before that) all anyone was told about was the impending ice age. Now it is the impending global greenhouse.

The problem really is that scientists are simply unable to tell what is going on. We have various models for determining what the weather will be like in 30 years. Moreover, whenver the model is asked to input old data and predict today's weather, it fails. (I heard this somewhere.) Also, the apparatus for measuring all this is hopelessly unavailable. Strict conditions for measurement that are required to even establish today's temperatures are unavailable. The UN and Russian organizations who are charged with doing a lot of this monitoring are so underfunded that we cannot be sure we are getting anything right.

So we have all this data that is very contradictory and we attempt to come to all these conclusions. We are all clueless.

It is a worthwhile precaution to cut our use of pollutants as much as is possible, and look for alternative energy sources. But Bush was sort of right for ignoring the Kyoto Protocol. (As a political move he should have just signed the stupid thing, but not on environmental gorounds.) But let us be very cautious before giving doomsday scenarios to the world.