Global warming, Europe and Denver

I was perusing a Web news site from home last night and saw a link saying global warming is responsible for the fact some ski resorts in Europe had no snow over the holidays. I did not click on the link, but earlier in the day that same site had a link to a story that 12 people had died in the past day or so because of the blizzard in Denver and the Great Plains.

I guess global warming is responsible for one but not the other.

In case no one out there has figured it out, many journalists would fail miserably as scientists or mathematicians. No snow in Europe? Global warming? Correlation, therefore cause-and-effect.

My statistics instructor at Ohio University explained the fallacy of that line of thought. Every fall when the students return to Athens, leaves fall off trees. Every spring when they leave town, the leaves return. Therefore the presence of university students is harmful to trees.

I have no doubt the earth is either warming or cooling. Consider your own body temperature. We were taught in school that our body temperature is 98.6 degrees. But does that mean my temperature is the same when I'm asleep as when I'm taking a long walk? I doubt it. So why should I expect the earth's temperature to remain constant over time?

And what about that 98.6 number? It was measured when the average American was about 20 pounds lighter than he or she is today. What does the increase in average body weight do to our "average" temperature?

I get so frustrated when journalists pass off easy cause-and-effect stuff when a little look below the surface shows they are parroting something they have heard or something an interest group wants them to believe.

Just call me a global warming skeptic. There is too much about the earth's climate to learn before someone like me can state for a fact that global warming is a myth or is the worst calamity facing mankind in 10,000 years.

And, no, I haven't seen "An Inconvenient Truth." If I see it on the shelf of the Cabell County Public Library, I might borrow it, but I'm not buying it or renting it.