Confusion

It was way too cold this winter, it started late in New England and I had parsley from my garden for Thanksgiving for the first time since i have been up here.
The cold weather reached Florida this year and the tomato crops were killed.
There was a lot of snow, all over the country, but the East coast has had record breaking warm weather for mid march, unheard of.
There are already floods on the rivers from all the snow melting.
This is the confusion about global warming or rather climate change.
We, who are not studying it, think with what we experience on a daily or seasonal basis and it becomes confusing.
Climate change means things are less predictable, an El Nino forms are the weather gets strange, we get more storms, more snow, more cold in one part that is typically very cold and another gets warmer weather.  Storms become harder to predict, a 25 mph front becomes a 80 mph hurricane.
It is the unpredictability of the weather that makes it climate change, not how cold or hot it is today or tomorrow or even this year.  Those are all variables.  It is the difference from normal patterns that spells a significant change.  It is abnormal fluctuations that are the problem and then there is the average temperature of the entire globe, which, despite cold in one place or another, is still going up.
We are in a solar minimum and that effects things greatly.  If it were not a minimum, the temperature would still be hotter.  The sun has a lot to say about it, so do we.
Now what about our part in it?
It is arrogance for us to think we do not effect the planet in very significant ways.
Is ours a major player?  No the major player is the sun and volcanoes, but we still have a part to play.
The climate changes and swings naturally also, but for us to deny that we contribute is arrogance or worse, greed.  Because it takes money and effort and it affects the bottom line for a company not to have an impact. 
Will it happen any way?  I would say yes.
Will it happen sooner if we do not do something to stop it?  I would say yes.
so why not try to help at least our grand children and they may be able to adapt.
It is clear that politicians and companies have no clue the way the debate rages on.
It is time to stop listening to either side of that debate, listen to the entire earth, we might see something.

Conffusion about Global warming

That is what you get if you look at the weather outside on any single day.
Global warming is about a cumulative effect over time.  Yesterdays and today's cold weather here in CT mean nothing because, If I wanted to look at it that way, I was picking parsley for dinner at Thanksgiving.
Neither tell a full story.
We can measure a definite increase in CO2 in the atmosphere that has been happening since the industrial revolution.  That will warm things up, but it will also make the weather even more unpredictable than it already is because things get unstable,
On the other side people want to blame global warming for loss of fidh in the Long Island Sound and that is not so easily proved.
As I have pointed out, man still was a major contributor, but our clean-up efforts have not occurred with our full understanding of what the impact is.
So in the freezing Northeast (Today) or the snowy Mid Eastern seaboard (today) or in warmer Arizona (currently) we will see what tomorrow will bring.
What ever we do, we have to think it through carefully.

The expert thing and global warming

Okay, so I have made myself into some kind of an expert according to this blog, but what does that mean and why?
First I no way did I every intend to be an expert, I just wanted to be a bench chemist, that is the work I love.
I did not go for a masters degree because that would mostly mean administrative work and i really wanted to be on the bench. I did not want to get a PhD, but obviously with the peer reviewed research i have done, I guess I could have, but that is not what I wanted to be known as.
What I wanted to do was two fold - I wanted to feel useful to others and i wanted to satisfy my curiosity.
The job at the Health Department was the door, my boss was the vehicle, he let me "go" in anything environmental as long as we did not have to spend too much money getting there.
When i worked for private industry, what you did with a sample was strictly limited to what you were asked to find, even if you "saw" hints of something that might be important.
At the Health Department, if I wanted to look at chloride for every sample that came into the lab, I could. If I decided nutrients were a was of time for beach samples, it was my decision.
The restriction was my curiosity.
That of course led to the first paper on softener discharge and increased salt levels in the water nearby wells.
The learning programming languages and databases help all of that, I could compile information easier and look at more variables with much greater ease.
Curiosity is then my major thing. If i saw nitrite in well water, i looked for bacteria. If they had a softener treatment on the water, I looked for chloride levels.
Learning about bacteria at beaches help begin processes at a national level.
I was just curious.
And that brings me acknowledgment from state and Federal scientists, that certified me as a expert, but it was all curiosity, always asking questions. Always asking: "What is this telling me?"
Global warming - I said i was going to say something about this.
It is based on a simple observation this year.
I have lived in Connecticut 33 years and seen 33 winters and 33 Thanksgiving and I always wanted to have parsley from my garden in the feast.
This is the first tine in 33 years that has happened.
Global warming is real.