Weathermen make long term prediction
I would like to discuss human hubris. Well, not really, but it sounds good. What I really want to say is that I find humor in the propensity of people in this era of modern scientific research to place so much faith in the statistical approach.
Now, I am not saying it is bad to rely on statistics, I just rarely think that statistics actually definitively prove your point. You see, often times, people are comparing apples and oranges … or tomatoes or potatoes … and not really realizing it.
For example, it seems, according to the latest scientific study of statistical studies of case histories of a host of individuals that eating organic food does not necessarily do a lot of good, at least in a nutritional sense. Hello, does that come as a surprise to anyone? It really shouldn’t.
The body needs certain nutrients, vitamins, minerals, etc. in certain quantities to be healthy. It needs to come in certain forms, however, but how those forms are grown, per se, really doesn’t matter. Of course the food has to be from a healthy plant/animal for it to be beneficial but how that plant is made healthy really doesn’t matter in determining its nutritional value.
Now, I will agree that some foods have less trace chemicals if they are grown certain ways, and those trace chemicals, if in significant enough quantities, can have a detrimental effect on human health. Unfortunately, growing things organically does not always mean that those trace elements won’t be found in food. The point being that paying significantly higher prices for food labeled “organic” may not be the wisest use of your resources.
However, having said that, I suppose a few years from now, some other scientist will come along and “prove” that eating “organic” is the next best thing to home-made sliced bread.
The same holds for the latest position paper by the American Meteorological Society (i.e.: Mainly those guys who bring you your nightly forecasts for the weather on TV). It seems that they are certain of two things:
One: the global climate is getting warmer.
Two: it is the result of anthropomorphic causes.
Oopsie. Statistically it might seem true, but then again it might be apples and oranges, with the apples being the climate is warming and the oranges being that is caused anthropomorphically.
I will not argue that the climate may be getting warmer but I would advise you to check back in two or three centuries, or even two or three millennia, to make sure. Despite what the doomsayers tell us, we really don’t have enough data to make sweeping statements about the climate and what it is doing. As best we can tell, humans have been sentient for about 15,000 years, give or take 15,000 or 30,000 years. You take that slice of time and see what portion it makes of the overall space of geological time, or even the time that life has been on the planet, and you realize that we are talking about an extraordinary teeny tiny bit of that experience.
So, first and foremost, before you say the sky is falling, make sure it isn’t a rain drop.
So, I am not sure that we are facing a deluge here, folks, and definitely the jury is still out on whether or not we can blame it all on human activities. It might be, and I am not going to say that it can’t be, but I am saying that when you look at the scope of changes over the course of the earth’s history it is entirely possible that these little tiny creatures running around, modifying their environment (as almost every species does to one extent or another), aren’t really the cause of the massive geologic climatological changes that our best and brightest are seeing.
Please, people, remember that we really have only about 30 years of good, solid, hard data on which we are making these sweeping predictions. All the rest of the data maybe good, but it is mostly based on assumptions, suppositions and interpretations of information that we really don’t know if it is valid or not.
And the models? Well, they are models. They are mathematical formulations that we hope mimic reality. But if any weatherman/meteorologist tells you that he or she really can tell you what the weather, or climate, is going to be like at any one point at any given time on the globe more than relatively few hours from now (which on the geological scale would be totally insignificant) with 100 percent accuracy, then they know they have just trashed their own credibility, because it is impossible. There just are too many variables out there, and too many of them that we mere humans don’t even begin to understand, for such predictions to be taken as gospel.
Heck, we don’t even, for the most part it seems, take the gospel as gospel any more.
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