What’s going on?

Things are crazy right now. Winter is not behaving normally. California is freezing their oranges off. Seattle has gotten pounded. Again. New Mexico has seen cattle killing blizzards.

I heard about a town somewhere in Nebraska yesterday that has been without power since around the first of the year and isn’t expected to get it back for several more weeks.

And then here in Savannah we’ve still been wearing short sleeve shirts with 70 degree days. I mean look at the current temperature map. There’s a whole lot of pink in places that are usually yellow this time of year.

Don’t get me wrong. For my part I’m not complaining. We’ve had it easy so far this winter.

But wildly unusual weather like this does make it a bit challenging to continue to be a global warming skeptic.

A Convenient Theory

Now I admit that being skeptical on the global warming thing is probably not so popular. But please don’t think that I am anti-environment. Fuel economy is high on our priority list in my car purchases. And even though the places we’ve lived in the South make it challenging to recycle my wife and I have recycled on our own through private concerns when we could.

In spite of the fact that I care, I’m still skeptical. It just seems too convenient to hear the high priests of the environment declare “Global Warming” at every single unusual weather thing that happens. Record high temperatures? Global Warming. El Niño? Global Warming. Oranges freezing in California? Obviously Global Warming!

I find it a tad suspicious that the theory seems to bend just a touch each time so that regardless what happens it can be incorporated as evidence the sky is falling. No, wait: The earth is warming.

Perhaps I’m a little simple minded or ignorant. But I have questions about the whole deal.

But how does record cold weather somewhere provide evidence that the planet is warming up?

Comparing how ever many millions of years our planet has been around with the few thousand years folks have been walking around (and the few hundred we’ve actually been recording the temperatures) how can we really be sure this isn’t some cyclical thing that is perfectly normal for our world?

When they take ice core probe temperatures they have to make some assumptions about things such as build up rates and stability of temperature at various depths. While these assumptions may be reasonable, how can we be sure they are true?

Different Biases

Now I admit I bring my own biases to the topic. Personally I think it is a bit arrogant for humans to believe we have that much influence or control over our planet.

As evidence exhibit A I’ll point to the science of Meteorology. In spite of all our technological advances and know how it is still pretty much a crap shoot whenever the weather guessers try to predict the future conditions in any particular location.

If our best scientists have such a hard time telling us accurately whether it is going to rain on the kids soccer game tomorrow night, how can we be so confident that what they tell us is coming down the road in a few centuries is any more accurate?

I guess I get the feeling on this one that many folks have made up their minds that human activity on this planet is bad by definition. Therefore they seem to present everything that happens through the bias that “proves” we are flushing ourselves down the toilet.

Maybe we are. I’ve gotta admit things are definitely a bit weird right now.

But maybe the planet is more resilient that most folks give it credit for. But that’s just The Way I C it.

Chris Cree is a regular contributor here at Successful-Blog and he helps businesses fuel growth through blogging with his consulting business, SuccessCREEations.