The concept of Global Warming is a rather new thing in the scientific and cultural world. Really in my experience it has been popularized in just the past 15 years or so. Because of this we see that the communinity as a whole has not yet agreed on exactly is global warming exists. In Michael Crichton's "State of Fear" we can see the conflicting ideas of this: "'So if carbon dioxide is the cause of rising tempatures, why didn't it cause temperatures to rise from 1940-1970?'" (Crichton 109-110) This is but one of the may arguments put foward that ilustrates some of the holes in global warming's argument.
Admittedly I grew up in a largely conservative household, but I really treasured my open-mindedness. I also have a pretty good mind for science and history. Global Warming is a different kind of theory than what I am used to. It takes in data, yes, but that data intrinsically relative to past samples. This is unlike gravity, wind resistance, orbital periods, or anything we generally learn in our math and physics courses, meaning it doesn't really have a value but rather it is a trend. This is where it gets more interesting. So when looking at the theory-or-whatever of global warming we are looking at many different facets of our living Earth.
The phenomenon of weather has been integral part of the human existence. For one if there were no change at all in weather through the year, our existence on this planet would be very boring, not to mention impossible. The fact that the patterns in weather exist has been a source of intrigue for humans for a millenia. It has its own science which in turn has many different sciences associated with it. It is then, through a cause and effect relationship with the rest of the technological strides of the human race, that databases have been formed comprised of data, from all over the world, that quantify the weather. This can then be analysed to see trends over the span of decades, if not centuries. Trends dealing with temperatures: maxes, mins, averages; precipitation amounts.
With the inclusion of the databases and the analysis of the data it brings we recently have been seeing an increase in temperatures as well as increasingly erratic weather patterns have caused an alarm. My view on the lay society on the topic of global warming is as follows: big celebrity brings a issue to the doorstep of these lay persons, lay persons decide if they care (in this case the deterioration of our ozone layer and a resulting "greenhouse effect"), lay persons then grab data and throw it at people who are not convinced with the intention of trying to convince them. This grabbing and throwing or data is yes a blunt way of putting it, but it is what these lay people are doing that baffles me: they don't have nearly enough understanding of the big picture of how this sample of data fits in to be making such a claim, they are failing in the analyse the data portion of the scientific method.
What I am trying to get across here is that there is alot of data from all over the world, and as Crichton pointed out in the "State of Fear", much of the data was taken with inferior equipment and perhaps with infrequent intervals, both relative to what we have here in the US now. This has the possibility to make the world data much more variable. While I have not made up my mind on this issue completely, I do have some opinions that I am more than willing to change.
It may also be prevalent to observe how the politics of global warming affect how we look at the science of it. Just in Crichton's novel there was a huge lawsuit. I found it was interesting not only the politics in the "State of Fear" were addressed but also the socioeconomic side of things as well.
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