Friday, April 27, 2007

Funny how things happen...

I mentioned in a previous post a discussion I had with a clan member regarding global warming and Kyoto. He referred me to a site entitled "Is man caused Global Warming a Scientific fact?"

Now, I work as a program administrator for a science scholarships program. Though I have training as a scientist, I abandoned that career path more than 20 years ago when I realized that I neither had the productivity nor the persistence to become a hardcore scientific researcher. So the skills I learned in grad school have pretty much been inactive since I finished my postdoc.

I read through the Xtronics web page on global warming, my gut reaction was: "This is wrong. There's lots of stuff that's wrong here." But then I realized that I didn’t have any arguments based on fact to compare with what I was reading.

I resolved then to write a critique of the Xtronics web page. So, I started reading carefully the Xtronics page, and consulting on-line resources regarding climate change and the issue of global warming. I won’t write here about my findings, since I will publish that on my personal website when it’s finished. However, from the way things are going, my response will be at least as long as the Xtronics article, if not longer.

But what is important to me, and why I’m blogging about it now, is the fact that I have started using some long-unused brain cells related to my past science career: unused for the past 20 years. I thought that such a long time would have made me rusty, and for sure the more technical knowledge aspects of what I am writing about has escaped me. But what has astonished me is how I have kept the “scientific mindset” (for lack of a better term) that I had in me all along and which got sharpened 20 years ago. I find that those things really didn't change for me.

As I was researching my response, I found it refreshing and fun to read, and write of things scientific – and I don’t just mean trying to distill concepts into lay terms, but to actually study and think and write critically, the way I did when I was a grad student writing my thesis or when I'd draft a publication. It’s the kind of thing where you know that whatever you are going to write is going to be examined by people who’ve done a lot more research than you, or are very familiar with the subject area, and will ask probing questions.

Cheryl found me last night writing and researching, and when I explained what I was doing, she asked me: “Why are you wasting your time?” (Being pragmatic, she was wondering why I was spending time doing this than doing something constructive, like paying the taxes or arranging for a load of gravel to be delivered.) I have no answer to her question other than to say I feel compelled to do it. I guess what irks me is to read something on the web or in the newspaper that I suspect is not true, and discover that people read the same thing and take it as truth. So I feel obliged to correct things.

Anyway, this blog entry is taking time away from my critique… Back to work!

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