Two Worries
I am a firm skeptic of global warming but I must admit to worrying about how long the world tried to deny or refute the fact that tobacco can cause cancer. Even aside from the efforts of the tobacco industry, many of us didn’t want to believe in the causation.
What the emails expose is an admission that tree rings are an unreliable measure of climate data. This is very significant is relation to the key question: how do we know that the rise in temperature, if any, is significant. What is a statistically significant period of time in the history of our planet? Over the planet’s history of millions of years, is a sustained rise in average temperatures of only one degree statistically significant or is it within the normal variation of the planet’s climate? If the climate database on temperatures only goes back 150 years,without tree rings, then the temperature increase over the past fifty or 100 years cannot be significant in relation to the earth’s history. Without answering that question, the causation of the temperature change, if any, is irrelevant.
