Obviously, this is not a weather blog
Another day in Mississippi, another report of a tornado. This time an EF-3 tornado touched down in Tupelo, Mississippi, causing damage, but fortunately no injuries and even better, no fatalities. This has been a fantastically busy weather year so far for Mississippi. I would hazard a guess that this is the most frequent I have heard of tornadoes and inclement weather since I have moved here.
That being said, I’m sure Al Gore and his massive carbon footprint will come out soon enough and relate this Spring weather in the South to global warming. Well, he’s already blamed the cyclone in Myanmar on global warming.
It’s hard to debate science and logic, when most people tend to throw logic and good common sense (if one ever possessed good common sense) when they are arguing. People will trend towards arguing what they are passionate about, or what they believe they should be passionate about… It does not make their position incorrect, but when you deviate from fact, you will find it hard to win any debate.
To be honest, I’m not knee deep in global warming data. I have not seen the Far North, nor have I tracked climatological data from the near Arctic or Antarctic regions over the last 20 to 40 years. What I do have on my side is a fair grasp of basic mathematics and a decent helping of common sense.
Whether you are a person that believes in an Old Earth version of history (5 billion years) or you subscribe to a New Earth version (5,000 to 7,000 years), the simple fact is that weather records in the United States have only been kept since the very late 1800s. If we were to assume that instruments were accurate back in the post Civil War era, we have, at best a little more than 100 years of meteorological data. If we compare this amount of data to the age of the planet, we have either 0.0000025% to 2.5% of all available data. To say that this paints a complete picture is, at best, intellectually dishonest. As a comparison, you have a better chance of reaching into a hat with sheets of paper listing the 32 NFL teams and pulling out the Super Bowl winner this year.
But, that is how the global warming argument is crafted. The Earth has been getting hotter since a while back, and since we know that, we can project into the future many years that it is only going to get hotter. Granted, this is a gross simplification of the scientific analysis, but it would be shocking to see how closely the simplified explanation mirrors the process.
Who is to say that the globe is not warming? Who is to say that if the globe is warming that this is not a cycle that has been played out over thousands or billions of years? Global warming may indeed be a fact, but until the scientific community can agree on its existence, it is a theory. We may learn more and more over the next few decades to silence all who doubt this theory, and it can be accepted as scientific fact.
To bring the argument to the forefront every time a hurricane, tornado, blizzard, heat wave, or cold snap kills hundreds to thousands or people, though, is spineless political move, and something that I can not respect.
