Global Warming

Barack Obama says his Administration is going to tackle the problem of climate change, and stop the seas from rising. He and his advisors apparently don't pay any attention to the data on temperature and sea level that are currently being collected. The average tempeature of Earth is about the same as it was 30 years ago, and tidal measurements have not detected any rise in the sea level over the last 15 years. Here is a comment from Australia that I got from the blog 'greenie watch."

"The sceptics are growing in confidence and becoming emboldened," says Ray Evans, secretary of the sceptic organisation The Lavoisier Group. "In terms of morale, the atmosphere in the blogosphere is very cocky. The chief weapon brandished by the sceptics is the raw temperature measurements from the British Government's Hadley Centre, which shows that global temperatures peaked in 1998 and have been cooler ever since. Climate change believers hate this evidence, saying that it is misleading and are urging people to concentrate on the longer-term trend where the evidence of warming is stronger.

This is ineresting because if one looks at the longer term, like back to 1800, the temperature change of the twentieth century was at about the same rate as in the nineteenth century, even thought the level of CO2 in tha atmosphere didn't rise significantly until the latter half of the twentieth century. And the seas have been rising since the end of the last ice age 12,000 years or more ago. The rate of sea level rise, if any, in the twenty-first century is less than in the twentieth century. I think that those who support the AGW hypotesis would want to concentrate on intermediate term data, like the second half of the twentieth century. At any rate, for politicians, Al Gore has gotten the train moving out of the station, and data are no longer important. Obama will no doubt fall back on the positions of improved national security by not relying on foreign oil, and that the world supply of fossil fuel is limited, and the Earth will soon expend most of that reserve that can be readily exploited. This is true, but the government and the Obama Admiinistration do not seem inclined to look for realistic long-term solutions.