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A chink in the armor of global warming
I was a big fan of Carl Sagan, the scientist and astronomer, when he was alive and so I was interested when I heard that his widow, Ann Druyan, was going to be on Bill Maher's HBO show the other night. She was there to discuss the "proofs" science gives us to many age-old questions that many people today question because it conflicts with their own personal belief systems.
One of the topics discussed by Druyan, Maher and the panel, which was made up of two conservative Republicans and one liberal Democrat, was global warming. During this debate and arguing in favor of global warming, she stated that the past year has been the warmest year globally in recorded history.
We hear that phrase and other similar phrases a lot in this debate and, on the surface, it's a pretty compelling argument. I mean "in recorded history" or "since records have been kept" obviously goes back a really long time so we must be doing something to make the world warmer.
The fact is, it doesn't go back very far at all. The first daily temperature recordings began in 1850, only a hundred and sixty years ago. Even that seems like a fairly long time until we look at how long this planet has been hurtling through space and the best estimates are for about 4.5 billion years. That's billion with a "b." One hundred fifty years compared with 4.5 BILLION years is nothing more than a nanosecond in time; a heartbeat; the blink of an eye.
Let's say that when the stock market first became a reality, it went up the first five days it was in existence and, since that five day history was all people had to compare it with, many would have predicted that it would have continued to go up every single day forever because in the five days it had been in existence, it had never gone down. Or if someone goes to a casino to play blackjack and wins the first five hands they play that they're going to keep winning every hand because they haven't lost yet.
We all almost intuitively know that's not right. We live in a scientifically correct, predictable, patterned universe. Anything that goes up must come down. If one flips a coin a thousand times, it will be pretty close to five hundred heads and five hundred tails when you're through.
However, the fewer hands of cards played, coins flipped, or daily stock market gains recorded are where anomalies occur. It's quite possible to flip a coin and get ten heads or ten tails in a row. It's certainly possible for the stock market to go up ten days in a row and it's also possible to win ten hands in a row at blackjack. But the law of averages eventually takes care of that.
That's how they're able to build all those billion dollar hotels in Vegas. The hotel owners and casino operators know that over time, people will lose their money because the mathematical odds are against them.
Now I hope the reason for all these examples is obvious. Keeping temperature records for only a hundred and sixty years and then making catastrophic predictions that the sky is falling on a planet that has been here for 4.5 BILLION years is the same thing as predicting continued success because of a very limited number of blackjack hands, flipping coins, or stock market gains. There simply isn't nearly enough data available to make those kinds of predictions.
We know that the earth went through an ice age before there were any gasoline powered engines, smokestacks, or anything else being released into the atmosphere that was bad for the planet because there wasn't anyone here to do it. Now I don't know if humans have anything to do with the uptick of global temperatures and you don't either but I WILL say that whatever we do to the earth in our greed and ignorance, I'm betting the earth can handle it because the house rarely loses and, in this case, the earth is the house.