Falacies in the global warming debate

Anyone who refers to individual events as proof of global warming or the opposite is playing the media game. It is simply impossible to pick out any particular event and trace back causes to incremented atmospheric CO2 or similar. Global warming does not manifest itself in any particular event but rather as a trend in events that occur naturally.

Global climate is very complex, and few if any understand the full range of processes and interactions. So when the conclusions need to be communciated to the greater public, simplifications must be made. And when this is further digested by the media, it is easy ending up telling a lie to prove the point. This goes for both camps.

For example, one may refer to a glacier breaking off at faster rate as proof of global warming. This serves to provide people a more directly visible proof, but one cannot conclude from any glacier that global warming is true. Next door opponents of the theory will point to a different glacier that is not breaking off and say that global warming is a hoax carefully desinged to make us all affraid of living. Neither can they point to a single event to prove their point.

It is easy to argue that global warming should cause glaciers to break off faster, ice caps expand due to increased temperatures, increase snow fall due to increased levels of water vapor which is again caused by increased temperatures. But, I doubt this will take effect so fast as seems to be the case. It takes decades if not centuries before changes to the average temperature on the surface is transmitted all the way down. I do not know how fast a few years or even decades of increased snowfall will affect the glaciers which after all have accumulated over thousands of years.

There are other effects that may cause changes in the flow of glaciers: Seismic events: Ice at the bottom melts, partly due to the preassure, and partly due to underground heat. The water lubricates and makes the glacier flow faster. As water flow it may break new paths and hence change the direction of the icecap. This can explain both the faster advance of one glacier and the halt of another.

Other effects can explain the halt of a glacier without disproving global warming: Increased melting. The icecap can either disappear by breaking off or by melting. Local conditions such wind direction, mountains and other effects may cause the melting to increase enough to compensate for the advancing glacier. And I'm just scratching in the surface of a must more complicated system.

All these details are of course left out of the debate because they complicate the picture, and hence loose the understanding of the general public. The result is that the public is only presented by a partial truth if truth at all in order to make them believe the truth.

This is the point of attack for opponents of the global warming theory, and they do the exact same thing. Point to particular events that support their claim, leaving out any detail that may question their claim.

So, when going into the debate of global warming there are two sane stands you can take:

Trust the scientific community. After all, they have spent decades investigating climate and geophycics of our planet to determine the interlinking of processes. It is very hard for any individual or even larger group of individuals to match the effort of thousands of scientists.

Alternatively, investigate every claim for your self with equal scrutiny and scepticism, whether they are for or against any conclusion, do not let their opinion, or your own opinion, mislead you. Go to the source data of every claim to verify it. This of course requires a lot of work, you are up against thousands of scientists covering vast scientific topics, topics that you will never know in every detail.

But in either case, discard the media: Either they are telling you a lie to make you believe the truth, or telling you a lie to make you believe a lie is true.