Climate Change??
November 10th, 2011 § Leave a Comment
The photograph shows an iris blooming on November 10 in northeastern Ohio. Climate change? Maybe, maybe not. Individual and isolated observations are not valid indicators of anything. Will this become the new normal sometime in the future? Certainly we have had an unusually warm and wet autumn. And an iris blooming in November is pretty unusual right now.
The October issue of Physics Today has an article by Steven Sherwood titled “Science controversies past and present – Reactions to the science of global warming have followed a similar course to those of other inconvenient truths from physics” comparing the present state of acceptance of climate change to that of the Copernican heliocentric model of the solar system and Einstein’s general relativity. His conclusion: “… history tells us that, in the end the science will probably come out fine. Whether the planet will is another matter.” The article is available on line and is an interesting read.
