Debating a Friend – It’s in the data!
January 25th, 2008
I recently was having a bit of a debate with a friend about manmade climate change and global warming. One of the things I pointed out that I would like to share is that of data. All of the alarmists tell us the data says we are heading toward catastrophe.
One of my contentions has always been that I don't believe the data is as "hard" as we are lead to believe. Most of these theories – and that is what they are – use computer models based on data that is put into them. Just like any computer, "garbage in, garbage out." If the data put into them or the models themselves are faulty, you do not get an accurate representation.
I pointed out a case in point in recent history how data can be flat out wrong. Up until this past August, the global warming alarmists pointed to 1998 as a seminal year – it was said to be the warmest ever in the United States. This was widely published for almost ten years and used to point to the "fact" just how much we were impacting the climate. The mainstream media had a hayday with this.
Well, interestingly enough, on August 17 of this past year NASA had to backtrack on this notion. Why? Because they screwed up the math! An amateur meterologist in Canada was looking at all the numbers and discovered they didn't add up. In the end 1998 dropped way down the ladder in ranking. NASA had to recalculate and restate all of their information but this of course was barely a blip in the media. Some of the new facts:
- The hottest year on record is 1934, not 1998.
- The third hottest year on record was 1921, not 2006.
- Three of the five hottest years on record occurred before 1940.
- Six of the top 10 hottest years occurred before 90 percent of the growth in greenhouse gas emissions during the last century occurred.
And that there just highlights one of my biggest issues – the data! The experts can't even get the math right when they have hard empirical data and yet we are supposed believe they can theorize global temperatures across thousands of years?
Just something to think about!
