INTERVIEW WITH GLOBAL WARMING'S TOP REPORTER: NY Times' Andrew Revkin Discusses Hurricane Debate; Peer-Review; His 'Bird's Eye View' of Climate Science; and His Next Book

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Over at the "ideas site" World Changing, David Zaks offers up an interview with the NY Times' Andrew Revkin. As I've written on this blog before, Revkin is one of the top science writers in the business, and the country's leading journalist covering climate change. For ScienceBlogs readers, the interview along with the World Changing site are definitely worth checking out. Here's how World Changing describes its mission and content:

WorldChanging.com works from a simple premise: that the tools, models and ideas for building a better future lie all around us. That plenty of people are working on tools for change, but the fields in which they work remain unconnected. That the motive, means and opportunity for profound positive change are already present. That another world is not just possible, it's here. We only need to put the pieces together.

Informed by that premise, we do our best to bring you links to (and analysis of) those tools, models and ideas in a timely and concise manner. We don't do negative reviews - why waste your time with what doesn't work? We don't offer critiques or exposes, except to the extent that such information may be necessary for the general reader to apprehend the usefulness of a particular tool or resource. We don't generally offer links to resources which are about problems and not solutions, unless the resource is so insightful that its very existence is a step towards a solution. We pay special attention to tools, ideas and models that may have been overlooked in the mass media. We make a point of showing ways in which seemingly unconnected resources link together to form a toolkit for changing the world.

Every link we post is informed by technology, but the new possibilities we cover aren't just high-tech. Sure, we all need to understand the uses (and dangers) of advances like biotechnology, the Internet, ubiquitous computing, artificial intelligences, "open source" software and nano-materials. But we also need to know how best to collaborate, how to build coalitions and movements, how to grow communities, how to make our businesses live up to their highest potential and how to make the promise of democracy into a reality. We need to understand techniques as well as technologies, ideas as well as innovations. How we work together is as important as the tools we use.

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Real science is lacking in the "global warming" issue. The data being used lack mathematical value. Climate is very complex, but many who call themselves "scientists" want a simple, "magical", explanation for air temperature. They support a primitive 19th Century concept that has never been proved and is in turn based on a view of the atom that has been disproved.

Those who claim global warming do so on the basis of comparing changes in the average high and low temperatures -- data which has no mathematical or scientific value. Averaging the high and low numbers in an irregularly distributed series of numbers cannot produce a meaningful result. A scientific approach would examine such characteristics as the temperature range (daily and annually by region) and how rapidly temperatures change during the day. Increasing the amount of tropical heat reaching polar regions could reduce polar snow cover could occur without any significant average global temperature change.

French mathematician Jean Baptiste Fourier suggested that what he called "dark rays" (IR) from the earth heated atoms, which he considered the smallest particles of matter, in the early 19th Century. J.J. Thomson proved that atoms consisted of even smaller charged particles in 1897. Niels Bohr proved that the absorption of specific wavelengths of light changed the energy state of its electrons rather than causing it to become hotter in 1913.

If climatic change is occuring we need a real scientific approach that examines the earth's energy system in all its complexity rather than an approach based on the idea that minor atmospheric gases can control air temperature as if they were magic.

Are you sure that your name isn't Reason McClueless? ;) Sorry to start with an ad hominem, but I just thought that the word play was funny.

You want an energy-system study? They've done that. And guess what, it's really mathematical and uses PCA analyses to look at the contributions of many factors.

http://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/abstracts/2005/HansenNazarenkoR.html

By Miguelito (not verified) on 04 Dec 2006 #permalink