March 15, 2006
Huge Explosion Caused Global Warming?
Vladimir Shaidurov of the Russian Academy of Sciences claims that our current global warming is due to changes in the level of atmospheric water amounts caused by the Tunguska Event in Siberia in 1908. Hmmm.
Posted by Kevin Murphy at March 15, 2006 12:34 PM | ScienceI'm not buying it. A number of lines of evidence, including Canadian ice thickness data, suggest that the rise in temperature began around 1975, not in 1908 as Shaidurov claims. It's well known that ice fields were in retreat since the 1800s (Kilimanjaro and Glacier Bay, Alaska), but there was a small _decrease_ in temperatures during the twentieth century until about 1975. 1975 is what we climatologists call the "regime change", although with all that pesky noise in the signal it was hard to tell until about a decade later.
Correlation is not causation, but I agree with Shaidurov that correlation is a good place to start looking for causation.
My first reaction was that the Tunguska event was just not big enough. The world's climate system is BIG! One little pop like a 15 megaton explosion just isn't enough to change things drastically.
I should also point out that Vladimir Shaidurov's theory about the Tunguska Event is a good example of how science is supposed to work. Some crazy guy proposes a theory, publishes the evidence, and everybody else gets to bang on it to see if the theory stands or falls. Next time I will be the crazy guy proposing a new theory. Everybody is supposed to get a fair hearing.
