[WikiEN-l] Re: Ed Poor not a neutral contributor

Wed Nov 26 15:14:19 UTC 2003

     > From: Daniel Mayer <maveric149 at yahoo.com>

     > his POV on this issue seems too entrenched for him to edit neutrally.
     > Thus he tends to sometimes give more weight to 'anti-global warming
     > theory' camps than is perhaps warrented.
     > ...
     > So I tend to direct major edits to articles I don't feel so
     > passionately about. It is much easier to be an approximation of neutral
     > doing that.

One might usefully apply this insight to both sides, I think.

It's worth remembering that the CFC process is many orders of magnitude less
complicated than the global warming / greenhouse gas question, since the
latter involves the earth's entire climate, which is an extraordinarily
complex process, and one which is still a long way from complete
understanding.

So people on either side who express certainty are probably unwise to do so.

To digress briefly, it appears from the prehistorical record (as best we can
determine it - although useful work has been done with isotope analysis, it's
still tricky to determine data from geological records) that the earth's
temperature has varied very substantially (without any human input at all, of
course) over the course of time, due to factors as arcane as the physical
configuration of landmasses, etc. (IIRC, the recent [in geological terms, of
course :-] Ice Age cycle is thought to have started when the Arctic Ocean
formed.)

A good sense of how poorly we understand climate can be seen in our article
[[Ice age]], an in particular the section "Causes of ice ages", which makes
clear how poorly we understand the operation of the climate.

If and when people have a climate model built only on basic physical
processes, which can successfully "predict" the pre-historical record, given
only the physical data (solar output, orbital path, land-mass configuration,
etc) then I think we can be more certain of the contribution made by
greenhouse gasses to the earth's climate - but our lack of understanding of
the Ice Ages makes clear we aren't there yet.

So I'd be wary of edits from people on either side of the controversy.

	Noel