Tag Archives: Economist

Introductions And Climate Change

Global Warming.Polar Bear

I have found a great new liberal voice, writer and thinker.  Further, he’s local.  Professor Steve Greene is a Political Science prof here at NC State University.  I firmly believe that the boys at PYM and the good Professor Scott Erb will find Steve’s insights, hopefully here, and at his own place, to be interesting and enjoyable.

I hope to see Steve here often.  Even if he’s wrong 😉

Anyway, while over at Steve’s place I saw one of his posts on climate change.  In it, I was reminded of a story that I’ve had in my stack for some time now.

Which is that global warming has stopped over the last 10-15 years:

OVER the past 15 years air temperatures at the Earth’s surface have been flat while greenhouse-gas emissions have continued to soar. The world added roughly 100 billion tonnes of carbon to the atmosphere between 2000 and 2010. That is about a quarter of all the CO₂ put there by humanity since 1750. And yet, as James Hansen, the head of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, observes, “the five-year mean global temperature has been flat for a decade.”

Temperatures fluctuate over short periods, but this lack of new warming is a surprise. Ed Hawkins, of the University of Reading, in Britain, points out that surface temperatures since 2005 are already at the low end of the range of projections derived from 20 climate models (see chart 1). If they remain flat, they will fall outside the models’ range within a few years.

Economist.climate change.1

I think it’s important to point out that this gets to the skeptic’s whole point.  That while the science that suggests higher levels of CO2 contribute to a warming planet, the positive feedback that is central to the alarmist’s argument is not at all understood or accepted.

The mismatch might mean that—for some unexplained reason—there has been a temporary lag between more carbon dioxide and higher temperatures in 2000-10. Or it might be that the 1990s, when temperatures were rising fast, was the anomalous period. Or, as an increasing body of research is suggesting, it may be that the climate is responding to higher concentrations of carbon dioxide in ways that had not been properly understood before. This possibility, if true, could have profound significance both for climate science and for environmental and social policy.

I think that the jury is still out.  I don’t see indications of a catastrophic change that has or is going to occur.  Until then, I think that we need to continue to watch, to observe and accept the fact that perhaps humans only have so much influence on the climate of Mother Earth.

 

Faith and the World

I would have thought the number to be smaller:

Hard numbers are often scant in questions of faith. But a new report from the Pew Research Centre, a self-described “fact tank” in Washington, DC, on the state of religious belief in 2010 provides some welcome light. It estimates that 5.8 billion adults and children—around 84% of the world population in 2010—have some kind of religious affiliation.

Of the 1.1 billion unaffiliated, many profess some belief in a higher power. Asia has by far the largest number of people who claim to have no religion; China’s official atheism explains much of that. But 44% of unaffiliated Chinese adults say they have worshiped at a graveside or tomb in the past year. And China has the world’s seventh-largest Christian population, estimated at 68m.

But I’m glad I would have been wrong.

 

Wherein The Economist Brings The Dynamite

I read the Economist because it annoys me.

Don’t get me wrong.  I love LOVE the cover art and the graphs are way cool; geeky cool.

But, they are Liberal Leftists from Europe and it just bugs me enough to net out annoyed.

Which only means I love it when they bring the whup-ass.

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