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Re: fHuman vs. natural influences on the environment



All locked up and nowhere to go wrote:
> Try reading several sources in the non-specialist science press.
> I can recommend Scientific American, New Scientist, Science News
> and Discover.  These will often cite sources in the peer-reviewed
> journals, which is about as uncompromising as you can get.  I
> often see them print critical letters.

UHG! I can recommend NOT trusting any of these. Sample: Sci. Am. published,
several times over the last couple years, a graph purporting to show the
rise in average global temp. over the last century. What they published
was a nice straight line with no error bars, and a rise of something like
1 degree C. They never mention that the year-to-year variation is vastly
larger than this 1 degree jump, nor that this curve is some kind of fit
based on climate models that are stupidly poor fits. Nor do they mention
anywhere that I could ever find that the primary greenhouse gas is water
vapour, and nobody really knows what has happened to it over the last
century.

Nor was there ANY kind of ref, not even to previous Sci. Am. volumes,
about where this graph came from. There was not even an author's name.

Environmental reporting is some of the WORST journalism you are ever likely
to find. Not only is it rife with the usual problems of simplifying things
for Joe-Couch, but it also suffers from being a political hot button.
And the usual argument is roughly at the level of "oh we don't really know
anything for sure, so we better do things my way."

UHG!

-- 
The preceding are my opinions alone and have nothing
whatever to do with my employer.  I don't even know what my
employer thinks. I'm not even real sure who the CEO is.
Dan Evens



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