I’m a sorry linker, when it comes to WSJ articles . But anyway, the other day* , after I posted about the beetles, the journal’s “The Numbers Guy” column was on climate models. Long discussion about how these models are inaccurate, unreliable, not good for making policy, etc. But then there was this graph. A very eye-catching graph.
–> Which showed, to my slightly-trained eye, that sure enough, over the past century the average global temperature (that’s got to be fun to measure) has been steadily increasing. Plenty of up-n-down blips, but the overall trend was mighty obvious.
Now what to do with that data another question entirely. I’m not persuaded it’s a man-made phenomenon, though I can certainly see why someone might think so — industrial revolution, all that. But as I think about Romans-to-Renaissance industrial ebb and flow, and then ponder the climate variations that went alongside, I just don’t see the connection.
It could be that my memory is poor — it’s not like I’ve got 2,000 years of ecomic and weather data neatly filed here at my hand. I’m just going off of bits and pieces pasted together from various reading over the years. So if someone has a nice readable [short, if we could] article fitting that slightly longer-term data into the current climate-change theory, do post. I really am not at all decided one way or another.
*That’s a technical citation, meaning “it is in my mulch box, no longer in the living room”. Which is how we date newspaper articles here.