Anthropogenic or Chaotic?
I sort of missed this fascinating controversy, which happened last Thursday but has been bubbling along for most of 2005. Popular novelist Michael Crichton has testified before the US Senate (link goes to NY Times article - registration required) on the subject of global warming:
My own position, as previously stated on this blog, on the question of climate change is that - while I recognise that the world is getting warmer, that the icecaps are melting, and that the consequences could be very serious for us all - the question of cause and effect has not been proven.
Oddly, this is also the position taken by Crichton in his recent book State of Fear, which is why he was called before a Senate which is obviously desperate to find dissenting voices.
The problem with Science is that, to a lot of people, it's become a bit of a religion. Never believe in absolutes, including this one: that's my philosophy. Scientists are as fallible and likely to embellish the truth as any religionist. Most researchers, for example, depend for their livelihood on funding. So they do tend to follow fashions in order to follow the money; and dissenters are often excommunicated.
Back in the 80s and 90s, the fashionable science was Chaos theory; which can also be termed complexity theory if you want to pull back from full-on chaos. This mathematically-based science has a particular interest in climate and weather systems. This is because it remains resolutely impossible to predict the weather reliably beyond 24 hours in most cases. So-called 5-day forecasts are a cosmic joke. They can't even predict the path of a hurricane without a margin of error measuring hundreds of miles.
So that's chaos as it relates to weather: sensitive dependence on initial conditions means that it's hard to predict. Impossible to predict. And, until I see it proved otherwise, that remains for me the position on longer-term climate change. Sunspots, wobbles of the Earth's axis, volcanic eruptions, and long-term climate cycles all have a bearing on whether we believe global warming is an anthropegenic phenomenon.
This, as I understand it without having read the novel, is Critchton's position. If you like, he's the voice of reason, pointing to the Emperor' New Clothes of climate research, and saying, you don't have enough data.
Because they don't. And the killer for me is this. Even if climate change is anthropegenic, even if that's true, if human activity over the past however many years is causing the earth to warm up, what effective measures can be taken that would make any meaningful difference over the next, say, 50-100 years? Show me one thing we can do tomorrow that will make a difference in 100 years. Because that's the kind of time scale you have to work to in order to understand the global climate, as far as I understand it. And in that period of time we're as likely to wobble on our axis and have a number of very cold years as not.
My advice to you is: don't live on the fucking coast. Higher ground is where it's at. And if you can't build on higher ground, build on stilts.
For many views entirely contrary to mine, see this interesting blog.
Many prominent scientists, no friends of Mr. Crichton, to be sure, believe that man-made greenhouse gases are causing the earth to warm and are urging lawmakers to pass new regulations that govern carbon dioxide emissions.
But after considerable study of his own, leading to "State of Fear," Mr. Crichton has concluded that the science is mixed at best, and that lawmakers should take that into consideration when they decide what they might do about it.
His is an unpopular and contrary stance when measured against the judgment of groups like the National Academy of Sciences. But it was not those organizations that asked Mr. Crichton to Washington to counsel Congress on how to consider diverse scientific opinion when making policy. It was the committee chairman, Senator James M. Inhofe, a plainspoken Oklahoma Republican who has unabashedly pronounced global warming "the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people."
My own position, as previously stated on this blog, on the question of climate change is that - while I recognise that the world is getting warmer, that the icecaps are melting, and that the consequences could be very serious for us all - the question of cause and effect has not been proven.
Oddly, this is also the position taken by Crichton in his recent book State of Fear, which is why he was called before a Senate which is obviously desperate to find dissenting voices.
The problem with Science is that, to a lot of people, it's become a bit of a religion. Never believe in absolutes, including this one: that's my philosophy. Scientists are as fallible and likely to embellish the truth as any religionist. Most researchers, for example, depend for their livelihood on funding. So they do tend to follow fashions in order to follow the money; and dissenters are often excommunicated.
Back in the 80s and 90s, the fashionable science was Chaos theory; which can also be termed complexity theory if you want to pull back from full-on chaos. This mathematically-based science has a particular interest in climate and weather systems. This is because it remains resolutely impossible to predict the weather reliably beyond 24 hours in most cases. So-called 5-day forecasts are a cosmic joke. They can't even predict the path of a hurricane without a margin of error measuring hundreds of miles.
So that's chaos as it relates to weather: sensitive dependence on initial conditions means that it's hard to predict. Impossible to predict. And, until I see it proved otherwise, that remains for me the position on longer-term climate change. Sunspots, wobbles of the Earth's axis, volcanic eruptions, and long-term climate cycles all have a bearing on whether we believe global warming is an anthropegenic phenomenon.
This, as I understand it without having read the novel, is Critchton's position. If you like, he's the voice of reason, pointing to the Emperor' New Clothes of climate research, and saying, you don't have enough data.
Because they don't. And the killer for me is this. Even if climate change is anthropegenic, even if that's true, if human activity over the past however many years is causing the earth to warm up, what effective measures can be taken that would make any meaningful difference over the next, say, 50-100 years? Show me one thing we can do tomorrow that will make a difference in 100 years. Because that's the kind of time scale you have to work to in order to understand the global climate, as far as I understand it. And in that period of time we're as likely to wobble on our axis and have a number of very cold years as not.
My advice to you is: don't live on the fucking coast. Higher ground is where it's at. And if you can't build on higher ground, build on stilts.
For many views entirely contrary to mine, see this interesting blog.
posted by Anonymous at
Tuesday, October 04, 2005
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