Thursday, February 1, 2007
Warming
I have been taking this ecosystem ecology class this semester, and we have been talking a lot about global warming. Apparently, the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has risen 30% since the Industrial Revolution. It is around 380 ppm. Just for reference, the glacial maximum concentration of carbon dioxide is 180 ppm, while that of an interglacial period is 280 ppm. Scientists have gotten these measurements by directly measuring the carbon dioxide concentration from the Vostok ice core. Then they have manipulated this data to somehow look at the flux of temperature over millions of years ago. How they do this, I am not really sure. It seems like an unbiased statistician would have to take into account the natural cycles instead of just human impact. The temperature rise should not be solely based on the rise in carbon dioxide concentration because in the past great changes in climate have taken place before humans. Anyway, just a thought. I was just trying to think of ways to be less biased about global warming because a lot of people seem to think that ecologists have an agenda.
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2 comments:
this is a particularly difficult problem, and not one that can be readily addressed conclusively using your basic statistics. as to the reason for this -- you get close to it with your reference to 'natural cycles'. this might also be a good point to explain the graphic i included in the upper left corner of the wiki page -- "n = 1, d.f. = 0" superimposed over a shot of the earth (i stole that idea from a teeshirt i saw once, b.t.w.). the point being, with only one earth, we can't do controlled experiments on a global scale, so we're flying blind, from a statistical point of view. perhaps a bit to much advocacy/activism.
You might want to check out http://www.realclimate.org/ or http://scienceblogs.com/intersection/. These are blogs written by climate scientists (RC) and a biologist/science writer (Int) who discuss global warming - including analyzing the stats in clear, layman terms - on a regular basis.
Cheers,
Nicole
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