Bias
I seem like a rational guy to most people, so sometimes they wonder why I can be skeptical of global warming after all we've heard about how terrible it's going to be. I mention to those people that I was shown videos in elementary school that threatened that acid rain was becoming such a huge global problem that it was causing our very umbrellas to melt away from overtop of us as soon as we step outside the shelter of our homes, and yet here I am, fifteen years later, still flaunting my fully extended umbrella at the sky and daring it to do its worst. Kids these days are being shown videos where their dogs are burned alive in a spontaneously combusting doghouse because they demand that their parents drive them to school. In fact, I saw an article today that claimed that global warming would cause the oceans to rise by 2-3 ft by the year 2100 (but I'm too lazy to look up the link; don't try to tell me you haven't seen these articles).
"Wait a minute," I said, "that sounds like bullshit. Aren't the oceans really big?"
"Yeah," said someone walking by, "I think I read that you could fit like five Texases into the ocean with room left over for, like, all of Canada."
"Dammit, this is serious," I said, and turned back to my computer and started typing furiously. He walked away dejected; he was just trying to help. But I had no time for his foolishness. Something had to be done about this before my umbrella caught fire while it was raining. I like that umbrella, and I'm not about to say goodbye now.
The area of the earth covered by oceans is 361 billion square meters. For the ocean to rise 2.5 ft (0.762m), 275 billion cubic meters of water would have to come from somewhere. I brainstormed for ways that could happen. Everyone in the world could drink 21000 2-liter bottles of pop and then all pee in the ocean simultaneously, but I didn't see how global warming was putting us in any immediate danger of that happening. A few thousand bottles of icy cold pop is refreshing on a warm day but not everyone lives close enough to the coast to make it practical.
Realization hit. They meant the ice caps! Not the ones from Tim Horton's (though that would be around 52900 each, by the way) - the ones on the arctic and antarctic. So all I had to do was figure out how many ice caps you could make by chopping up the ice caps, and I'd know how far the oceans would rise. I went back to Wikipedia.
Bingo. The Antarctic ice sheet, the biggest in the world, contains 30 million cubic kilometers of ice. That's not even enough to make seven thousand ice caps for every person on earth! And that's not even taking into account that ice is less dense than water! That doesn't sound so bad. We're talking about like twenty centimeters of ocean rise, tops. Everyone who lives twenty centimeters from the ocean is fucked but the rest of us should be okay. I breathed a sigh of relief and dipped my fists in broken glass to prepare to write a scathing comment questioning the author's manhood.
Hang on though, the wikipedia entry says that there's enough ice in Antarctica to cause the oceans to rise by 70 meters! I rushed to the lab, poured smoky fluids from beakers into plastic Tim Horton's cups, ran expensive Tim Horton's physics simulations on the supercomputer cluster, and absentmindedly drank a thousand liters of caffeinated pop as I paced the lab going "How can this be?" (sorry, people who live 0.01 millimeters from the ocean, I really had to pee afterwards and the lab is right by the shore). Look at that picture comparing the ice sheet in 1957 to 2006; it's lost like thirty percent of its surface area. Does that mean the oceans have risen 20 meters? Are we all underwater right now? The only plausible explanation was that the world had been replaced by some sort of massive distributed robot-driven simulation to distract us from the fact that we are all underwater. The supercomputer cluster whirred and beeped and confirmed that this was the most likely scenario.
After several hours of meditation attempting to break the fiendish hold of the machines and wake up to take my first glimpse of the real world, my eyes flew open. "Wait a minute," I said, "The people responsible for telling us the earth is fucked are all climate scientists, and they insist that the only way of saving the earth is years of intensively funded climate research!"
Suddenly it all made sense. Like when I met that pig farmer who claimed that the first recipe for bacon was taught to man by God and was known to cure cancer and give people great skin, the climatologists were trying to use my fear of drowning to convince me to hand over my wallet. But how had they found out that I'm terrified of drowning?
I was down the rabbit hole now.
"Wait a minute," I said, "that sounds like bullshit. Aren't the oceans really big?"
"Yeah," said someone walking by, "I think I read that you could fit like five Texases into the ocean with room left over for, like, all of Canada."
"Dammit, this is serious," I said, and turned back to my computer and started typing furiously. He walked away dejected; he was just trying to help. But I had no time for his foolishness. Something had to be done about this before my umbrella caught fire while it was raining. I like that umbrella, and I'm not about to say goodbye now.
The area of the earth covered by oceans is 361 billion square meters. For the ocean to rise 2.5 ft (0.762m), 275 billion cubic meters of water would have to come from somewhere. I brainstormed for ways that could happen. Everyone in the world could drink 21000 2-liter bottles of pop and then all pee in the ocean simultaneously, but I didn't see how global warming was putting us in any immediate danger of that happening. A few thousand bottles of icy cold pop is refreshing on a warm day but not everyone lives close enough to the coast to make it practical.
Realization hit. They meant the ice caps! Not the ones from Tim Horton's (though that would be around 52900 each, by the way) - the ones on the arctic and antarctic. So all I had to do was figure out how many ice caps you could make by chopping up the ice caps, and I'd know how far the oceans would rise. I went back to Wikipedia.
Bingo. The Antarctic ice sheet, the biggest in the world, contains 30 million cubic kilometers of ice. That's not even enough to make seven thousand ice caps for every person on earth! And that's not even taking into account that ice is less dense than water! That doesn't sound so bad. We're talking about like twenty centimeters of ocean rise, tops. Everyone who lives twenty centimeters from the ocean is fucked but the rest of us should be okay. I breathed a sigh of relief and dipped my fists in broken glass to prepare to write a scathing comment questioning the author's manhood.
Hang on though, the wikipedia entry says that there's enough ice in Antarctica to cause the oceans to rise by 70 meters! I rushed to the lab, poured smoky fluids from beakers into plastic Tim Horton's cups, ran expensive Tim Horton's physics simulations on the supercomputer cluster, and absentmindedly drank a thousand liters of caffeinated pop as I paced the lab going "How can this be?" (sorry, people who live 0.01 millimeters from the ocean, I really had to pee afterwards and the lab is right by the shore). Look at that picture comparing the ice sheet in 1957 to 2006; it's lost like thirty percent of its surface area. Does that mean the oceans have risen 20 meters? Are we all underwater right now? The only plausible explanation was that the world had been replaced by some sort of massive distributed robot-driven simulation to distract us from the fact that we are all underwater. The supercomputer cluster whirred and beeped and confirmed that this was the most likely scenario.
After several hours of meditation attempting to break the fiendish hold of the machines and wake up to take my first glimpse of the real world, my eyes flew open. "Wait a minute," I said, "The people responsible for telling us the earth is fucked are all climate scientists, and they insist that the only way of saving the earth is years of intensively funded climate research!"
Suddenly it all made sense. Like when I met that pig farmer who claimed that the first recipe for bacon was taught to man by God and was known to cure cancer and give people great skin, the climatologists were trying to use my fear of drowning to convince me to hand over my wallet. But how had they found out that I'm terrified of drowning?
I was down the rabbit hole now.