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July 29, 2006

Understanding Global Warming Is Beyond Me

The other night my husband and I were watching a Dennis Miller standup routine and, as usual, he was talking politics. And I couldn't help laughing when he got to global warming and poked fun at our reliance on 100-year-old technology for measuring temperatures, etc. to determine whether the planet is truly warming today.

A couple days later, and now I am reading a news article that says virtually the same thing. Outdated technology from decades ago may not have accurately measured hurricane strength, and the rash of nasty hurricanes we've seen of late may actually be no worse than those of the past.

"The methodology is fine. There's no problem with the way they analyzed the data …The problem is with the data itself."

I don't know about you, but all this conflicting science is very upsetting to me, and with all that is at stake the politicians are interfering with it to the point that it is nearly impossible for the average person to distinguish between truth and fiction. I see awful weather seeming to increase all over the globe, so the concept of global warming feels correct.

We have floods, famines, fires, hurricanes, tornadoes, etc. like I've never seen in all my 42 years. Okay, I know that's not terribly long. But it does seem to me that something is wrong. On the other hand, whenever I hear reports about record-breaking weather, they almost always include a caveat: it's the hottest, wettest, dryest, etc. "since 1915" or some such date from many years ago. In other words, we had this sort of weather before, but it's been a really long time.

What does it all mean? In a nutshell, it means ordinary people like you and me have to either become scientists in order to justify our positions on global warming, find a watchdog group we trust and go with whatever they tell us, or forget about it and go on about our lives. Or, I suppose, become conspiracy theorists.

Posted by Becky at July 29, 2006 10:52 AM