Chapter: Comics
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Graph from the nice people at NOAA.
Interestingly enough, the saw-toothed shape of the graph occurs because there is more land, and therefore more plant life, in the northern hemisphere. Therefore in the northern hemisphere summer there is a net transfer of carbon from the atmosphere to the biosphere - and vice versa in the NH winter. SCIENCE. IT WORKS, BITCHES.
I wish they had adjusted the vertical scale to show the proportion of co2 to the rest of the air better. The climate change deniers can use it the way as it is to accuse NOAA of misrepresenting the data.
You’re ignoring what skeptics actually say. It’s not that they disagree that CO2 levels are rising, or even that humans are contributing to that. It’s that we don’t know enough about climate science to definitively say what the CO2 that we’re putting in the atmosphere will do.
Does it make more sense to let loose the reigns of economic progress that might allow us to be prepared to cope with any change that may or may not happen, or to attempt to coerce the actions of our fellow man into acting against his own interests because of your own self-belief that you can predict with certainty the outcome of an extremely complex system given slight variations in one of it’s many inputs?
They are skeptical of the predictions that the models make, and how much certainty they can give. They are not skeptical that burning fossil fuels, breathing, and cow flatulence put more greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere.
ignoring what skeptics actually say is the usual approach. :]
“let loose the reigns of economic progress” I believe it makes more economic sense every year to switch from fossil fuels to clean energy sources.
Statistician: ‘The Y-axis of a graph should start at zero.’
Not if there aren’t any data points below 300 it shouldn’t.
If we only started recording the data in the mid-1950s and not one data point has been below 300, why bother showing the graph below that?
(I should point out that I can’t tell if you’re being serious or sarcastic there).
Aw, it’s the classics. “Therefore, any calm person, who is not blind or idiotic, can see that in the Old Oolitic Silurian Period,’ just a million years ago next November, the Lower Mississippi River was upwards of one million three hundred thousand miles long, and stuck out over the Gulf of Mexico like a fishing-rod.”
So is that ‘Skeptic’ as in archaic or North American use?
Thanks for posting a pro-environment comic. I’m tired of seeing comics that use “environmentally friendly” as part of the joke.