From David Snokes at Christian Scientific Society:
Kevin Birdwell gave a general overview of the issue of global warming and humans’ contribution to it. On the scientific side, one of his main points was that carbon dioxide is not the whole story; there are many other considerations, possibly the greatest of which is the warming due to urban “hot spots”—people’s experience of heat rises in recent years may be much more related to the effects of city density (which can raise local temperatures by 10 degrees or more) than to overall global warming (which has been about 1 degree in the last century). He held out hope that new technology could solve some of these issues of urbanization. His talk was quite balanced, which means that some who are quite committed to human-caused global warming felt he gave far too much credibility to skeptics, and those on the other side that he gave too much credibility to the standard global warming view. One of the main issues that came up in the open and private discussions was how hard it is to explain to the public the notion of error bars and uncertainty, which can lead some scientists to overstate their cases to the public.More.
Right. And never underestimate the public taste for a-crock-a-lypses. There are many incentives to cater for that taste. The only remedy seems to be common sense reasoning, which is back-ordered as usual.
See also: A-crock-a-lypse!: Scary predictions in the light of Earth’s history
Follow UD News at Twitter!