What Now?

While this blog will never go so far as to long for a 'simpler time' when there was less information around, it must confess to being serially flummoxed by dissent and controversy in the scientific community.

This isn't about iffy new sciences like nutritionism. It's impossible to coallate valid data and develop good theories on eating habits that have been around for less than a generation, so for most part I ignore the headlines (More Protein! No Carbs! No, More Whole Grains! OMG, Omega-3!!) and follow the Golden Rule of food: eat what your great-grandmother ate, and for heaven's sake not that much, because she was a farmer.

No, this is about real science, the kind that's been around for a while, or at least, has irrefutable data banks to draw on covering great periods of time that nobody can argue with and only need to be interpreted logically. Is that so hard? Is it really?

Why can't this blog make up its mind about global warming (climate change, whatever), then?



This blog watched An Inconvenient Truth. Got all fired up, to tell you the truth, because yours truly is impressionable that way, and it's irritating sometimes because this blog does not want to be a goddamned teenager with a new cause every week. But it was so convincing! Spiffy charts, low on the theatrics, no discernable corporate lobby behind it, and hard data mined up from prehistoric ice, I ask you?

But apparently it was bogus. This Canadian fella (Canadian! Immediately trustworthy!) who is a proper climatologist and all, PhD etc., thinks so. The worst part of it is, he says he's tried to publish papers arguing his side of it and keeps getting rejected for no good reason, and to tell you the truth, one of the statistics Al Gore used to make his case was: there is a 100% consensus among climatologists on the issue of global warming, judging from the articles in peer-reviewed journals. So he was only telling a very convenient truth there?

There's something missing here. Let's think clearly for a second, shall we? We have evidence being chucked at us from both sides. One side is clearly better supported than the other both in terms of arguments and experience (hello, winter 2006/7?!!), but why would this supposedly scientific establishment simply refuse to publish opposing evidence? Very fishy. What we need, I think, are standards.

Do both sides agree that there's more CO2 in the atmosphere these days? (hard fact)
Do both sides agree that it's humans who've released this extra CO2? (dunno, but kinda obvious, isn't it?)
Does extra CO2 cause global warming? (hard fact, or is it??)
Have we in fact reached the point where we can say there is extra CO2, more than there ever was before in the history of the world since the last couple of ice ages at least? (dunno, but Al Gore was very convincing on this point. The charts!)

The hostility point as made by that Canadian fella is bothersome. Why the rancour? How can rational debate not compel the experts to agree on one version of reality in this matter? What am I missing?