You wrote, "Explain to me why the meteorologists will probably get tomorrow's temps wrong, by more than 1 degree. Not to mention precip or lack thereof...
Let's just start there, with science."
It's true that day to day variations in weather are very hard to predict, but that does not mean that long-term trends cannot be predicted. For example, if you look at a newspaper weather report, the average high/low temperatures for each part of the year nearly always contain the day's real temperatures--even if the day's forecast was wrong.
In the same way that you can be pretty sure that a 90 degree day probably happened in summer in Boston and a 30 degree one in winter, not the other way around, long-term prediction works.
I have trouble understanding why people would consider global warming such a ridiculous idea. Each American produces about twenty TONS of carbon per YEAR. The atmosphere is very thin--we can't breathe just 5 miles up. And the layer of life on the earth is very, very thin. So why is it so difficult to imagine that dumping trillions of tons of carbon into the atmosphere, enough to raise the CO2 level by about 30%, wouldn't trap heat? It's a Science Fair experiment that any high school student could do, to show that CO2 and other greenhouse gases trap heat.
I think we're stuck in an old mentality. The American West gave us a fantasy that nature was unlimited, and ours for the taking, that the world is huge and we're tiny. It's simply not true anymore. Simple calculations show that the amount of ancient carbon deposits (fossil fuels) we've burned ought to warm the earth. And weather records prove it, with 5 of the 10 hottest years in recorded history in the past 10 years. Simple graphs show the earth warming decade by decade since the start of coal-burning in Europe.
It's so logical--and so vastly supported by evidence at this point--that even President Bush stopped saying it was "just a theory" about two years ago.
Who wants to call it "just a theory"? Some of the largest corporations in America (including the largest, Exxon/Mobil), who make tens of billions of dollars a year taking ancient carbon out of the ground and selling it to us. It just so happens that our entire current administration is oil people, so it's not surprise that they take the oil industry line on this subject. There is almost NO real scientific controversy about the reality of global warming--it's a given, and it's already happening. Sea levels have risen, coral reefs are dying, the Arctic ice will be history, Glacier National Park and Mount Kilimanjaro will have no snow--all because we love Ford Explorers and can't get our heads out of the sand.
A couple of months ago, one of the few remaining skeptics in the scientific community, an MIT hurricane expert, official changed his mind and joined the consensus that increased hurricane strength is due to global warming. With thousands of scientists (who have no reason to have major political agendas, and are both conservative and liberal) on one side and almost none on the other, why are we having this debate still?
Mariner.
