Email
Delicious
Digg
Facebook
Google
Yahoo
As The Science Museum’s resident Global Warming skeptic, I feel an obligation to weigh in here. ;-)
I welcome Mr. Musser's approach. It's refreshing to have someone so willing to listen to all sides. However, it is said that the best way to win an argument is to know your opponent’s position better than he knows it himself. And in this, Mr. Musser fails. He presents his argument, assuming that the reason people are skeptical about Global Warming is because they do not understand some part of it. But that’s not it at all. I agree with and accept all four of his aspects (well, three-and-a-half, anyway), and am still dubious about Global Warming.
Let me back up a second and define some terms. By “Global Warming” (capital letters), I refer to what might termed the standard hypothesis: the series of cause-and-effect that is presented by environmentalists such as Al Gore. It goes something like this:
· Human beings pump a lot of carbon dioxide (CO2) into the atmosphere.
· CO2 is a “greenhouse gas” – it retains heat.
· This heat warms the globe.
· This warming will have a serious – perhaps dire – impact on the environment, and all life on Earth.
Which leads to two inescapable conclusions:
· Human action is causing global warming
· Human action – and only human action – can stop it.
Neat and tidy argument, no? Connects all the dots.
Well, no, it doesn’t. There are numerous dots that don’t fit this pattern. In fact, there are two huge ones that cast this whole hypothesis into doubt:
= = =
1. Climate is complicated. There are so many factors, so poorly understood, that it is virtually impossible to make direct cause-and-effect assertions. In fact, back in the ’80s, climate was the poster child for the new field of complexity studies (a.k.a. Chaos Theory). There are systems so sensitive to initial conditions that if you change just one variable by a tiny, imperceptible amount, it will set the whole system running off in a different direction. And – here’s the kicker – that direction cannot be predicted. Climate is just such a system. Pete DuPont, former governor of Delaware and chair of the National Center for Policy Analysis (a political think-tank) notes:
“There are substantial differences in climate models--some 30 of them looked at by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change--but the Climate Science study concludes that ‘computer models consistently project a rise in temperatures over the past century that is more than twice as high as the measured increase.’ "
In other words, climate scientists come up with theories as to how climate works. They test those theories against actual climate data, and the theories are way off. Clearly, we do not know enough about climate to know how much effect humans are having, and how the climate may change in the future.
2. Climate is dynamic. The Earth’s climate has always changed. I’m not just talking about Ice Ages. Even during historic times, global temperatures have fluctuated more greatly than what we are seeing now. 2,200 years ago Europe was so warm that the Alps were glacier-free. Clearly, this was not due to gas-powered engines or coal-burning factories! Later temperatures dropped, but rose again around 1100 – the Medieval Warming Period, which allowed the Vikings to colonize Greenland and reach America. Temperatures cooled off again around 1600, the onset of the Little Ice Age. Again, this was purely natural, and not caused by a change in human consumption patterns.
More recently, global temperatures rose from about 1890 to 1940; leveled off or even fell slightly; then began rising again from 1980 to 1998. (They’ve been holding fairly steady since.) Heck, there is even global warming on Mars! All of which leads Richard Lindzen, MIT Professor of Atmospheric Science, to argue that the human impact on global temperatures is unknowable. Whatever effect we may be creating, it remains within the range of ups and downs the Earth has been going through since long before the Industrial Revolution.
= = =
So I in fact agree with all four of Mr. Musser’s points. Yes, the Earth is warming – no doubt about it. Yes, no question, humans are pumping tons of CO2 into the atmosphere. Yes, CO2 is a “greenhouse gas,” though there seems to be some debate over just how strong a factor it is. And yes, changing global temperatures will have some impact on the environment. (Though this is where I start to veer off – my “half-agreement.” No one can say what the impact, if any, might be, or even if it will be bad. As Yogi Berra famously said, it’s difficult to make predictions about anything, especially the future).
But there’s more to the debate than just those four tidy points. And the pieces he leaves out are the very pieces which call the standard hypothesis into question.
It is definitely possible that human beings are indeed the cause of the recent warming. But that has not been proven. Until it is, any proposed changes in human activity would be an attempt to cure a problem that may not exist. And since some of those “cures” could drastically reduce the quality of life for billions of people around the globe, it’s best to go slow on the more radical proposals. After all, people have been predicting the end of the world ever since shortly after the world began. And they haven’t been right yet.
Science Buzz and all related activities
Add a new comment