Man, what a load! Sometimes this magazine is very difficult to take seriously.
Suppose that AGW is real. That doesn't tell us enough to do anything useful about it. We must have a reliable and non-controversial metric to evaluate it quantitatively. This would allow us to determine (1) if our "solutions" (whatever they might be) are doing the job, and (2) when we can stop crippling ourselves and our industrial economy in our efforts to stop whatever it is that's causing the change in the metric. Unfortunately the items so often quoted by Warmists are not reliable metrics. (Think tree-ring data - that obviously is no good.) In theory there is a good one but it's not terribly sensitive and there's probably a serious phase delay, but it's a good worldwide integrator and so much better than spot measurements at weather stations. I refer to sea level. Now like pretty much all other old MIT men world-wide, I take a lot of data just for the hell of it. One such data set I have been accumulating since the 1960s is sea level. My measurements show no noteworthy change. NONE. My tentative scientific conclusion is that there is no net warming, caused by human activity or any other factor. None. Reports to the contrary I must tentatively classify as hysteria or propaganda.
I might conjecture that the Warmists are not really interested in a reproducible metric. Lacking a metric, they can always claim that whatever we're doing to solve the problem isn't enough - we need to do more of it. How convenient - they can push us to destroy the modern economy and industrial civilization, with no good place to stop along the way. This should eventually satisfy the Greens and other Luddities. But it won't do the Earth much good, since we'll all be huddled around campfires by then. Campfires fueled by wood. Talk about a carbon footprint!
As scientific types know, you don't have to take anyone's word for this stuff. Get your own data. All sorts of important measurements can be done with simple equipment. Read Millikan's "The Electron" for some inspiration about measuring fundamental constants with simple stuff you probably have lying around your kitchen. Or, if that's too high-tech, look up early measurements of the gravitational constant. Shoot, this stuff is easy! (Some of it is, anyway.) If you are just picking between "authorities," though, you aren't doing science. That's fandom, or religion, but not science. This pitiful article is a case in point.
I guess that's why they call it "popular" science, hey if it's popular it must be science Right?Science Damn You!,
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