Humility…it’s a good thing

I’m sure the majority (but not all) of my IPCC colleagues cringe when I say this, but I see neither the developing catastrophe nor the smoking gun proving that human activity is to blame for most of the warming we see. Rather, I see a reliance on climate models (useful but never “proof”) and the coincidence that changes in carbon dioxide and global temperatures have loose similarity over time.

There are some of us who remain so humbled by the task of measuring and understanding the extraordinarily complex climate system that we are skeptical of our ability to know what it is doing and why. As we build climate data sets from scratch and look into the guts of the climate system, however, we don’t find the alarmist theory matching observations. (The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration satellite data we analyze at the University of Alabama in Huntsville does show modest warming — around 2.5 degrees Fahrenheit per century, if current warming trends of 0.25 degrees per decade continue.)

It is my turn to cringe when I hear overstated-confidence from those who describe the projected evolution of global weather patterns over the next 100 years, especially when I consider how difficult it is to accurately predict that system’s behavior over the next five days.

Mother Nature simply operates at a level of complexity that is, at this point, beyond the mastery of mere mortals (such as scientists) and the tools available to us. As my high-school physics teacher admonished us in those we-shall-conquer-the-world-with-a-slide-rule days, “Begin all of your scientific pronouncements with ‘At our present level of ignorance, we think we know . . .’” John R. Christy, Wall Street Journal

Yikes, another scientist leaves the reservation.

To spend billions, indeed trillions, of dollars trying to reduce CO2 which is possibly, but not certainly, responsible for some global warming effects, assuming that there are any and that they are not caused by another mechanism altogether, in the absence of clear, tested and unambiguous science is the height of folly.

A fact which is dawning on politicians even as their middle class constituents begin to wonder if, maybe, the whole thing is not just a tiny bit overblown.

(hattip newsbusters)

Written by jay on November 2nd, 2007 with 2 comments.
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