I don't know how much you guys know about advanced statistics, but just wanted to share with you guys some of the work the scientists do. This isn't meant to be condescending, I just don't know what your level of statistics knowledge is.
Anyway, scientists have large amounts of trend data related to temperatures, sun spots, ice cores, parts per million of many different gases in the atmosphere, avg snow fall, etc etc. What scientists do is they take all of this data and develop theories. For example, one theory may be that CO2 and temperatures are correlated. To test that, they take CO2 levels going back 800,000 years from ice core samples and run a regression analysis against temperatures over that period. Based on that, they have found a very strong correlation. Not only that, but they found that CO2 levels have been rising dramatically since the industrial revolution and that so have temperatures. So they know that when there are very high levels of CO2, the probability is very high that temperatures will increase.
In addition, scientists have sensors all over the world on many mountain tops that measure CO2 parts per million in the atmosphere. So we can measure with a great degree of certainty how much CO2 and other gases are in the atmosphere. They also measured how much CO2 was created by human activity by measuring many different manufacturing plants' output, as required by most governments. Based on that, they can tell how much CO2 has been put in the atmosphere by humans versus natural processes. Right now, it is their estimate that the majority of CO2 going into the air is from human industry.
That combined with the statistically significant correlation between CO2 and temperature rises, leads scientists to conclude with 99% probability that humans are causing an increase in CO2, which will lead to significant global warming.
That's the science behind it. There is always a small probability that there is something external to their analysis that is causing these trends, but the possibility is so remote as to be statistically insignificant. It's sort of like saying cholesterol may not have caused my heart attack, therefore, I shouldn't worry about lowering my cholesterol. That's a big risk to take given the available evidence.
Just food for thought. |
