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Re: [Phys-l] climate vs weather; was "why and how"



Absolutely true, but when the dramatic predictions are shown to be wrong, it backfires. Take the assertion that, because their habitat is decreasing, polar bears are on their way to becoming extinct. A great PR tool, because who wants polar bears to die off? Kids really don't want that. You can show pictures of polar bears clinging to small ice floes and it tugs at heartstrings. The only problem is that it turns out polar bear populations are increasing. It also turns out that polar bears regularly swim up to 40 or 50 miles in open water and end up clinging to ice floes as a matter of course. In the end, the polar bear issue becomes exposed for what it is, which is a scare tactic. That has the effect of reducing confidence in what people in the scientific community are saying.

This reminds me of a cover on the old National Lampoon magazine, showing a dog with a gun to its head. The caption: If you don't buy this magazine, we're going to shoot this dog.

The ironic thing is that this kind of scare tactic is totally unnecessary. It really should not be controversial that the Earth is in a warming trend. I believe that most laypeople, when shown the 500,000 year graph of ice core data on temperature, would agree that, given where we are in the graph, we should all expect the Earth to warm right now. Why don't more people use the ice core data to make that point? Because it raises the possibility that the Earth's warming is a natural thing. Personally, I'd like laypeople to first understand that the Earth's warming is to be expected, regardless of our CO2 output. Once that issue is out of the way, then it's time to address the consequences of humans putting all that extra CO2 into the atmosphere. I don't think one wins an argument easily by hiding the big picture. Months ago I related here a teleconference I had with a group of fifth graders. They knew of the greenhouse effect and they had seen Al Gore's movie, and that was about it. They had never seen the full graph of ice core data. They thought that changes in CO2 caused changes in temperature throughout the Earth's history. They were convinced that humans are causing catastrophic warming of the Earth, but they weren't learning much science in their science class.

Bill

On Dec 22, 2010, at 11:41 AM, John Clement wrote:

So I would say that predictions that are eventually accurate and which ring
true are very valuable in convincing and galvanizing them to action.