More Hot Air

Have you heard we're having a bit of global warming? There's quite a bit of funny business going on about which the average person knows nothing. Here's an example.

We've been hearing on the news that atmospheric carbon dioxide is now at a record level of 381 ppm (parts per million). How do we know this is a record? Because we measure the CO2 content of ice core samples drilled in Antarctica and elsewhere, giving us a snapshot view of what the atmosphere was like hundreds of years ago.

But hold the presses! It turns out the CO2-in-ice measurements produce values between 160 and 700 ppm, sometimes going as high as 2450 ppm. Apparently, numbers that are too high are discarded because they are too high. (This is science?!?)

Sometime last year a Dr. Zbigniew Jaworowski of Poland testified before the United States Senate that measuring carbon dioxide content of ice core samples is not valid for a number of reasons, most of which result in lower readings as the CO2 escapes from the sample.

Just thought you would like to know (more here).

This is somewhat reminiscent of the hockey-stick temperature graph that was created using tree-ring data (and other stuff). Then a pair of Canadians discovered that if you fed random numbers -- okay, that's an oversimplification, they used "red noise" -- into the program instead of tree-ring data, it produced the same hockey-stick temperature graph. Doh!