Climate Change
Is there signifigant climate change? If so, are humans causing it? If so, is it catastrophic? If so, can it be averted? If so, why will a given plan work?
It bothers me very much that my current knowledge of the facts about human-caused climate change is no better than my knowledge about evolution was in the days when I accepted Creationism as actual science. I want to attack my area of ignorance, since the ramifications are important enough that a strong opinion is going to be morally required of me, and since I don't have the right to strongly hold an uninformed opinion. (Did you ever consider that? You don't have "the right to your opinion" on a topic on which you aren't going to do the work to get informed.)
My current reading is not making the picture any clearer. What bothers me even more than my state of ignorance is that I don't see a way to resolve this through any amount of diligent research if I don't know who to trust. I trust the scientific community, but I don't trust the political process. (In a moment I'll go into part of why this is.)
Years ago, I was a Creationist, quite well-versed in the arguments across the breadth of Creationist literature, only to have it devastated when I engaged in a massive Manhattan-Project-style reading binge of TalkOrigins.org. I hope that a thorough reading across the breadth of environmental literature will yeild conclusions that firmly. But in the case of climate change, the signs of junk science are everywhere, supporting every conclusion. Every scientist quoted in the debate appears to be cowed and censored with funding at risk, a mis-quoted and edited sock puppet on the hand of industries seeking exploitative profit, or of regulatory government seeking election to pass the rest of their platform. Scientific testimony appears to proliferate to discredit opposing scientific testimony on this topic, accusing it of being fatally compromised by a political faction that desires to use it to justify an economic system. That discrediting evidence is then, itself, discredited in what may turn out to be an endless cycle.
The experience of watching An Inconvenient Truth -- a feature-length political advertisement which was just as much about the irrelevant details of the biography of Al Gore as it was about global warming -- was marked by the constant awareness that everything I was being told could be true and vitally important, and the knowledge that everything I was being told might turn out to be a deliberate deception.
Gore said, "Out of 925 recent articles in peer-review scientific journals about global warming, there was no disagreement. Zero." It turns out those 925 articles were not about the climate at all. (Or were they? The claim they were not could be a lie.) Footage is shown of collapsing glaciers, and this turns out to have been what glaciers have always done. (Or is it? How can I believe that either?) On and on it goes.
I would like to always be cautious before casting accusations of lying. It's a serious charge, and it's immoral to make it to soon or too lightly as I did against the scientific community when I was a Creationist. But have you noticed that in politics, the statements of fact are so opposed that the only recourse is to accuse the other faction of deception? One side or the other obviously has to be lying. It could be both. The consistent Lysenkoism of the current Republican administration does not mean that the Democrats are not also turning science into Lysenkoism.
What motivates scientists? Science is supposed to be the business of finding things out. It makes no sense to go into that profession if you only do so to lie and cover up the truth for an ideological agenda. The pay and job security are rotten. Only one percent of the top one percent is likely to become famous. There is virtually no prospect for putting together a massive conspiracy to conceal climate change, or a conspiracy to reveal it where it doesn't exist, since other scientists have so much to gain in their careers by exposing your mistakes. There is no such conspiracy in the international scientific community.
This is where politics comes in, which is the source of science funding. Politics is not about truth, it's about getting things to be the way you want them to be. It's like a corrosive acid on the good and decent people who choose it for a career. When a seasoned and successful politician results from that starry-eyed youngster, it is no longer that idealistic person; it has become an image marketed by careful handlers behind the throne like Karl Rove or James Carville, sweet-talked by corrupt lobbyists who protect all that wealth and power at stake. The ones who stay idealistic and don't compromise are the ones whose brief and failed careers you never hear about. It seems to require playing fast and loose with the truth in order to accomplish something that one hopes will be, on balance, good. One is swept into a machine of compromise in the hope that the ends justify the means.
You know that the issue I think about the most is this: how to tell what is true. An individual can't possibly study everything in the world, and has to trust the credibility of experts. When we can't trust our institutions, it's a disaster. Where can a lay person turn for scientific answers that are free of activism? Why are there no Science Courts or Idea Futures Markets?
I'm going to diligently pay attention to climate change until a picture of the scientific fact emerges from the political activism, even if it takes so long that the economy collapses from the burden of un-necessary and misdirected regulations, or I die in a flood from a melted ice cap, or both.
Comments
jeffreyab on Jun. 15, 2006 11:30 PM
Look around, most of the evidence is that we will have to face global warming and the activities we do add to this.
Ever read "Ringworld" and find out what the puppeteers had to do to their planet?
Energy Curves
drkelso on Jun. 15, 2006 11:34 PM
Michael Crichton had a recent fiction book (the name escapes me) that dealt with the con side of global warming. Even though it was fiction, he packed it full of references to go look up and read. I haven't done that so I can't comment on the validity of what he was purporting but it was interesting to read.
avt-tor on Jun. 16, 2006 9:32 PM
Michael Crichton also wrote a thriller about how Japan was plotting to take over the United States. He put in lots of references which were basically racist drivel. Footnotes are not science.
atdt1991 on Jun. 15, 2006 11:39 PM
Thank you for posting this. I suggest that the united states is a poor place to look for scientific fact right now. I would spend more time studying the discoveries of other nations.
rmeidaking on Jun. 16, 2006 1:41 AM
My take on climate change is that it's been steadily getting warmer on Planet Earth since some time prior to the end of the last ice age. That is, at some point it stopped getting colder, and started getting warmer, and it's continuing to get warmer. I don't think humans caused that reversal, so clearly it's not ALL our fault.
Meanwhile, I realized way back in sixth grade that if you wanted to make things warmer on Earth, the thing to do was to get a device that burned things (like an automobile engine) and encourage all the people everywhere to run it all the time.
Then figure out ways to pave everything. Even so-called parks, where there are gazebos and pavilions and sand pits and parking lots, but wind up being useless in terms of habitat for plants, let alone anything else.
This will get the earth warmer, and thwart Earth's attempts to moderate the temperature.
Meanwhile, according to a couple of articles I've read recently, the sun is putting out more heat than it used to. That's not our fault.
I had a Rocks For Jocks class this year. One of the things we learned is that there is ice that is one million years old on Antarctica. But - and in my opinion, this is a big BUT - it's *only* a million years old. Clearly Anarctica was ice-free a little over a million years ago. Okay, it's been a long time, but still. That wasn't our fault, either.
So, I think it's partly our fault, and partly not our fault. In any case, it clearly is happening, and we have to take measures to cope with it. What those measures should be, and how forceful we should be in pursuing them, remain as open questions.
Meanwhile, my near-Amish cousins no doubt take this as proof that we shouldn't be meddling with things like internal combustion engines in the first place. I personally am trying to find the middle path. Does that make me a Buddhist? I don't know.
blastedbill on Jun. 16, 2006 3:31 AM
humans think them selfs grand and powerful. we have very little effect on the climate. the world has has so many climate changes in the millions of years it's been around and we get all hot under the collor when it changes a few degrees. africa used to be a lush forest. michigan used to be baried in ice. the climate changes. deal with it.
gregvb on Jun. 16, 2006 3:41 PM
So your saying that since the Industrial Revolution, when pollutants were churned out in mass quantities and have increased almost exponentially since then, that the Human Race has had no meaningful effect on the our climate? Come on, I know your smarter than that.
While I'm no scientist, I've observed changes in climate in my own lifetime. When I was a kid, I remember getting snow as early as October. Now, it's not unusual not to see snow 'til December. This past Winter, our first real snowfall was on November 23rd, which I thought was early, based on previous years. Based on these obervations, IMO, the climate IS changing and I'd lay bets that Man is the primary cause.
avt-tor on Jun. 16, 2006 9:38 PM
Actually since way before the Industrial Revolution; London has had a problem with smog since the 12th century.
When I was a kid, I remember getting snow as early as October. Now, it's not unusual not to see snow 'til December.
Exactly. Reading about glaciers detaching from Antarctica may be abstract and people can think Hurricanes Katrina, Rita, Wilma, and the ones they had to go into another alphabet to name may have been a one-time fluke, but we can all compare the snow in our backyards to what we grew up with as kids.
I don't know if Man is the primary cause or not. But if you're accelerating downhill, the question of whether the car engine or gravity are pushing you down is kind of beside the point; it still makes sense to stomp on the brake before going over the cliff.
amanda_lodden on Jun. 20, 2006 9:40 PM
Climates change. The problem is that on a planetary scale, we've been around for such a small period of time that we have no idea what the planet's cycles are really like. We've been documenting things for even less time, only a few thousand years total, and much of that inconsistently. We have only two weather report from more than 2000 years ago, when some guy built an ark and got a section of the Bible for it, and when a mysterious rain popped up and got a mention in the Bible as well. Both were probably exaggerated a bit.
Even now, with our obsessions with documentation, we still apply a lot of filters to make things work out the way we want them to, by not mentioning the inconvenient bits.
You talk about when the snows started when you were a child and point to it as proof that things are getting hotter. But you don't mention the summers at all. I distinctly remember a summer when I was maybe 8 or 10 (which would put it at 1981 - 1983) in which we had several days of 100+ degree weather. I can't recall a summer that hot since then. If the climate is getting hotter, why aren't the summers hotter too?
I also recall that in SE Michigan we got snow on May 1, 2005, well after our normal start of spring. Should I hold that up as proof that things are getting colder and we're on the brink of The Next Ice Age? Of course not.
The reason you can't find solid information, Matt, is that there isn't any. Pre-historic man is, well, before history. Before we started writing things down for posterity. The climate cycles may be because of us, and they may be because nature just does that from time to time. And we only have a small sliver of time in which we have any idea of what happened, so comparing what is to what was is laughable at best.
This does not mean that I think we should ignore our effects on the world. Tree-huggers (not to be confused with the more sane environmentalists) yell about how we're killing the planet, but the planet has survived far worse than us, and it will survive us. What we're really worried about is us surviving us. We'd be more effective at that if we stopped cloaking it in rhetoric about what it might possibly be doing to the planet and worried instead about what it might possibly be doing to that neighbor who can't be bothered to return our chainsaw after three years that we don't really like much anyway. Which pretty much explains WHY we get up in arms about the planet, because everyone likes the planet but there's always other human beings whose death you'd be okay with.
avt-tor on Jun. 21, 2006 5:57 PM
Anecdotal evidence isn't about proof, it's just about emotional validation. From my perspective, your memory of hot summers in the '80s is proof that things are getting hotter.
We know the hurricanes are getting worse. We know the seas and air are getting warmer. The Arctic Ocean is becoming an open sea along Canada's north coast, which has not happened in the memory of Inuit culture. Roman wells in the Levant show a constant water table dating back 2000 years, until they started rising over the past several decades. We know sheets of ice are cracking off Greenland and Antarctica, and we know that changing the albedo of the planet will cause the Earth to retain more solar heat.
It's simply not true to say that we don't have evidence. There's plenty of geological evidence that shows the temperature of air, water, and earth over time. There may be natural causes to changes in the climate cycle, but it is not contested that human activity is a significant contributing factor. And we know that India and China will within our lifetimes each require twice as much energy as Europe and North America combined do today.
It's like evolution. The only controversy about global warming is political, not scientific.
I don't know anything about "killing the Earth" or what the planet will look like after humanity is extinct. The decisions we face are economic. We have to weigh the cost of reducing greenhouse gas emissions against evacuating coastal communities like New Orleans, Manhattan, southern Florida, Bangladesh, etc. We need to look at engineering technologies to protect the landscape that would be overwhelmed before we can reduce our impact on the climate.
The hard lesson of New Orleans is that geological change doesn't happen subtly. The average sea level rise may be millimeters per year, but that average works out to a disaster here, a cataclysm there, and so on. Some of the engineering projects may take decades, which is a significant time frame in terms of risk management.
In a real sense, this is an American problem. The US is the main contributor of greenhouse gases, it can serve as an example to other countries (specifically, it can serve as a negative example: many countries won't be motivated to take steps the Americans aren't doing), and it could influence other countries through trade, diplomacy, and technological innovation. This problem belongs squarely and directly with the US Congress.
This isn't just some tree-hugger nightmare. This is the world we live in, and which we would like our children and grandchildren to be able to live in as well.
treebones on Jun. 16, 2006 1:05 PM
Actually, I also am quite edgy about holding a strong opinion about something when I can't claim the opinion is also well-informed.
However, in this case, I don't have time to do the legwork you're doing, so I'll try to use you as my first-tier filter on this topic. Apologies for being lazy, but it seems a good gamble, since I'm pretty sure you'd despise yourself if you were less than rigorous on this. (:
phecda on Jun. 16, 2006 6:45 PM
I look at it this way -- regardless of the reasons for the recent warming trend, and what the outcome of that trend will be, and how many species go kaput because of it, I have absolute faith that life will eventually reassert itself, balance will be restored, and diversity will flourish.
Of course, my guess is that there won't be any humans around to enjoy it, and that it will take many millions of years for restoration to occur.
matt-arnold on Jun. 16, 2006 7:08 PM
I'm not all that interested in that outcome.
algebradancer on Jun. 19, 2006 5:14 AM
My favorite book on that particular topic is: "After Man", by Dougal Dixon. It's a heavily illustrated field guide to the large land and water animals of 50 million A.D., assuming that humans, currently endangered species, and animals dependent on us (like domestic dogs and horses) go extinct within the next, oh, million years or so. It's a fun read.
eilrahc on Jun. 19, 2006 3:12 PM
Well, creationism to me has always seemed counter-intuitive, even when I was young. There is mounds of scientific evidence supporting evolution, but nothing but leaps of faith supporting creationism.
Global warming, well, that's such a different story that I'm not sure its useful to compare the two. There's data on global warming, but I understand that much of it is contradictory and funded by those with agendas. Everytime an environmentalist group sponsors a research project to come to one conclusion, an oil company retaliates with their own, for example.
To top it off, it's a really hard task to figure out all the climate cycles that happened between now and billions of years ago and trying to figure out where we're at in comparison. We had an ice age not terribly long ago, what's to say we're not on the road to a heat age?
I'm largely on the fence wrt this issue, but perhaps with a slight lean to the left... As a civilization, we have, and are continuing to, decimate almost every valuable natural resource that this planet provides. While the jury is out on how bad this is for the Delicate Natural Balance of Things, it's hard to see how it can in any way be good for it.
whitejedi on Jun. 19, 2006 7:15 PM — Climate Change Has a Scientific Reason
The most reasonable explanation of climate change takes in different factors. One, the earth is heating up from the inside out, therefore causing more volcanic activity in the oceans and glaciers melting faster. Second, more volcanic activity in the oceans means the chemical balance being upset. Third, plankton are very sensitive to how salty the ocean is. More glaciers melting means more fresh water being introduced into the ocean, changing the salinity and killing off plankton. Less plankton means more Carbon Dioxide being released into the atmosphere. I've read somewhere that solar winds affect climate change too but I can't remember how. These changes in the ocean also account for changing weather patterns. Anyways, the scientific explanation makes a lot more sense than the poitically correct theory that humans are to blame.
pavestcrit17 on (None)
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