Proving I'm Not a Kneejerk Liberal

First the fluff.

Isiah Thomas, the embattled General Manager of the New York Knicks and a guy that recently threatened ESPN funny man The Sports Guy, has been accused of sexual harrassment. I don't have a clue if there is any truth to the lawsuit, but I found one thing in the filing to be absolutely hysterical. The complaint alleges that part of Thomas' grand strategy for bringing the Knicks back to respectability was to schedule more Sunday home games to start at noon so that the opposing team would frequent several strip clubs that Thomas is associated with the night before, get intoxicated, and play sluggishly. Because basketball players love strip clubs.

I'm not sure which part of this story I'm enjoying more: the claim that Thomas has associations with NY strip clubs or the idea that the Knicks are such a poor excuse for pro basketball that they actually need the Strip Club Advantage to win games. Either way, more egg on the face for Isiah and the Knicks and ultimately the NBA.

Anyway, to turn political for a moment, I'm a bit perturbed by claims like, "It's 68 degrees in January, it must be global warming." I've done quite a bit of academic research on the matter and one thing is very clear in my mind - global warming is a hell of a lot more complex than most people understand. Which is why, ultimately, I'm a bit pissy about the latest claim by NASA that last year was the "warmest on record". Not only does the latest study claim that last year was the warmest in recorded history, but also the study claims that the planet has warmed 1 farenheit over the last 30 years. Here's why they're wrong:

1) We can't measure global temperatures: We simply don't have the capability. If we had effective satellite data, that would be a start. But we don't. The NASA writeup clearly states the error potential:

"Error sources include incomplete station coverage, quantified by sampling a model-generated data set with realistic variability at actual station locations, and partly subjective estimates of data quality problems (4)."

What this means is, they have satellites that have partial coverage, that they then use to extrapolate a general picture. The error rate of this is extremely high (and something they vastly underestimate) because we simply don't know enough about climate to extrapolate data on a global scale.

But don't take my word for it. They say it better in footnote 8:

"Another source of difference is the method of averaging over the world, given the fact that data is not available everywhere. In the GISS method, we divide the Earth in four latitude belts. Within each belt the region with data is weighted by area. The anomaly for the entire belt is then taken as the anomaly for the portion of the belt that has data. The global anomaly is then the area-weighted mean of the four belts. This method gives equal weight to the hemispheres, but if one of the belts has little data that is not actually representative of the entire belt, substantial error can occur."

Yep, they're averaging data and substantial error can occur.

Other problems with measuring temperature include:

- We can't accurately measure ocean temperature. There are various sampling methods, none of them are reliable. We get a range, but it's not precise, nor is it necessarily indicative of a global phenomenon. In short, isolated temperature sampling is not generalizable.

- Temperature data is often skewed by the urban heat island effect. In short, cities are warmer than rural areas. Buildings and roads absorb and retain heat. That causes spikes in the data. Scientists are aware of this, but compensating is complicated, especially since they don't adequately understand all of the various feedback mechanisms like the effect of Sulfer Dioxide (a cooling agent).

- Data points don't indicate "global" warming. The fact that it doesn't snow in London anymore doesn't mean that the world is warmer. It just means that London is warmer because it's a massive city that elevates the average temperature enough to nudge it out of the snow zone.

There's a lot more (most of which I've forgotten), but the point is obvious: If we knew half of what we think we did, we'd wouldn't have to study climate anymore.

2) Even if our measurements NOW are good, measurements from 10-100 years ago were NOT good. The crux of the study is not what the absolute temperature is - it is that we are warmer NOW than we were BEFORE. That, in short, is a bunch of nonsense.

It's not nonsense because it's not true. It's nonsense because it's unproveable. We simply don't have reliable temperature records from before 1980 (when we launched the first satellite system to look at temperature) and it's laughable to suggest that temperature readings from 1950 are even remotely accurate since those readings are entirely based on the temperature found in urban areas.

All of this pisses me off because it does a disservice to the cause. I honestly don't know if we are warming or not. But I can say there are two clear reasons to shift away from fossil fuel use:

1) CO2 emmissions are responsible for 90,000 US fatalities a year from air pollution. At least, that was the figure in 1998. I imagine it's gone up. We have a clear need to detoxify our air to save American lives. Think about it. That's 30 9/11's a year just because we haven't devoted the resources to finding effective renewables.

2) Vulnerability to unstable, Middle Eastern dictatorships: America's troubles in the world can be linked to one enduring reality - our addiction to fossil fuels. Eliminate that and there is no Iraq, there are no troops in Saudi Arabia, no Al Queda, etc. But we've got our fingers deep in the pie simply because we don't have a viable alternative. We need independence from oil for the simple reason that it is unhealthy for a strong power to be so vulnerable to weak powers, not to mention the gross harm these relationships have inflicted on the world.

Thus, I'm a bit peeved everytime I see a new NASA "study" on global warming. Grandiose claims about rising temperatures just opens the debate up to enterprising Republicans that are clever enough to use some of the arguments I listed above to undercut the agenda. Instead of talking so much about the apoctalyptic implications of global warming, we should be discussing the day in, day out impact of fossil fuel use on our country and the word.