I'm Too Liberal for My Shirt

Friday I was sitting at the reference desk and watching the catalog with an eagle eye. I ran up and got Inconvenient Truth 12 minutes after one of the three copies was checked back into the system. After seeing it, I'm still convinced that it shouldn't have won any Oscars. Oscars are for filmmaking, and all the filmmakers inserted into Al Gore's slide show was some sappy biographical information and random still photo collages of the sort that are on the "History" channel.

The movie did, however, did convince me that global warming is happening, and we are probably causing it. I think it is the causal link that is still in question by (reasonable) people who don't agree. To me, the link makes sense because of the connection between CO2 and warming. Gore showed several charts (with source attribution and units) connecting changes in CO2 levels to changes in temperature. When CO2 goes up, so does the temperature. We can measure how much CO2 we put into the environment, so we can predict how much warmth this is likely to generate. The other thing that really interested me was the statistic (here in Science) that 75% of a random sample of peer-reviewed journal articles on climate change contained explict endorsement of the position that "the observed warming of the last 50 years is likely to have been due to the increase in greenhouse gas concentrations accurately reflects the current thinking of the scientific community on this issue." 0% disagreed with this statement, while the other 25% fell in between. I'm not an objectivist -- I don't think we can have certain knowledge. But I do think that the scholarly review process is the best way to judge the validity of a scientific, measurable theory like global warming.

If you want to study this further, here are some places to start:

http://lwf.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/climate/globalwarming.html

http://www.epa.gov/climatechange/

http://www.loc.gov/rr/scitech/tracer-bullets/globalwarmingtb.html

These are .gov sites because they tend to be the most reliable scientific sources freely available on the web. There are lots of non-governmental, peer-reviewed journals and databases, but most are subscription-based.

On another hot topic--presidential candidates--I kind of like Kucinich. Basically, he wants to turn the US into the Netherlands -- legalized drugs and prostitution, and anti-war. Radically logical -- he'll never get elected. I don't think I can really vote for him because of his economic stance, though. Call me naive, but I still kind of like capitalism.