Ask me if I “believe in UFOs” and I’ll reply, “Sure.” Ask me if I “believe in global warming” and I’ll again reply in the affirmative. The first response will brand me a kook to many people while the second will hold me in good stead amongst the majority of Americans. Unfortunately, they misunderstand.
Many people take the term “UFO” to mean “flying saucer” or some extra-terrestrial spacecraft. I don’t. I use “UFO” to mean exactly what it was intended to mean: Unidentified Flying Object. So, do I believe in UFOs? Yes, and so does the US Air Force, as it happens. During the years that Project Blue Book was in operation, most all sightings of “UFOs” could be explained one way or another. But about 7% of them could not. These remain unidentified. Since they were seen in the sky, we think of them as flying objects, unidentified: UFOs. These days we’d call them unexplained aerial phenomenon.
Like Fox Mulder, I want to believe. But the evidence of flying saucers is lacking. I am unable to believe that extra-terrestrials have visited Earth. I’m going to hold out for actual evidence.
As for “Global Warming,” I take that to mean exactly what it says as well. Warming of the Earth, no more, no less. Most people these days understand the term to mean “human caused (anthropogenic) warming of the Earth’s atmosphere.” Of this latter concept, I remain unconvinced.
I know that warming of the Earth can and does occur naturally and periodically, followed by cooling, because it is well documented that it has happened many times in Earth’s long history. That human activity has had a significant effect on the temperature of planet Earth is yet to be proved. No, really.
For many of the believers of human caused warming, it’s an article of faith; they believe it because they want it to be true. There is no scientific consensus that man-made warming is occuring. To be sure, the IPPC (the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) has issued “consensus” reports on climate change but those reports were the reult of a political process which involved alteration of the scientists’ summaries by bureaucrats and the rejection of minority opinion. The “consensus” is artificial. Contrary opinion and evidence are not non-existent, they’ve just been eliminated from the reports by True Believers.
Note: I am not saying that man-made warming is not occurring, I’m simply saying that it has yet to be (satisfactorily) proved. Global Warming alarmists (for the rest of this piece, I’ll use “Global Warming in the popular, mankind-as-bad-guys sense) have made a variety of predictions about how much warming we’ll experience if we don’t change our evil ways. The predictions are all the result of flawed computer models.
A computer model is just a program into which you feed historical data and which then predicts the future. Atmospheric science is a very complicated subject and the computer models are correspondingly complex. But testing a computer model is easy: you feed it data from, say, 1970-1980 and then ask it to “predict” the conditions in 1990. We then compare the model’s predictions against what we know to be true for 1990. If it doesn’t match, the model is flawed and cannot be trusted. The models used by global climate scientists predict too many things that are at odds with what really happened. The models, as currently employed, are flawed and we should not be trusting predictions made by them.
“UFOs” and “global warming” are both misunderstood and misused. They have something else in common. We should believe in neither until we see some hard evidence.