I think Gray is largely correct. But I have one verbal quibble. Why is climate change a problem? Or, rather, why is it a problem now, but wasn't a problem before?After all, there has never been time when the climate wasn't changing. Change is what climate does. It is a process, not a fixed state. Is the idea to turn it from a process into a fixed state? That sounds like a tall order. In the meantime, here's evidence that Global Cooling is Here. Of course, that's change, too. But that must be a good change? Because warming is bad, right?
This is not a scientific issue. It has to do with the corruption of language. To speak nonsense about "stopping climate change" is precisely the sort of thing Orwell was talking about in Politics and the English Language":
This is not a scientific issue. It has to do with the corruption of language. To speak nonsense about "stopping climate change" is precisely the sort of thing Orwell was talking about in Politics and the English Language":
A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, and then fail all the more completely because he drinks. It is rather the same thing that is happening to the English language. It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts. The point is that the process is reversible.
You're right, Frank. It's really the apparent rate of change that's the potential problem (note the qualifications). If climate continues to change at the current rate, huge stresses will be placed on already strained ecological systems, possibly leading to social, economic, and political instability. That's certainly the view of long-range planners in businesses and governments around the world. Science will answer the questions of magnitude and causation in typical "science time" --- that is, very slowly. Right now, the critical questions are policy questions: what to do in the absence of certainty, when the risks are significant and mankind's capacities to respond technologically, economically, and politically are slow and faulty. The current economic crisis provides a good display of mankind's global "risk management" capabilities.
ReplyDeleteBut I can't even see that there is any agreement regarding the rate of change, let alone the direction. As Freeman Dyson has pointed out, the biosphere is the single most complex system we study and we know about it only a small fraction what there is to know. The point of drawing an analogy with the current financial turmoil is that much of that turmoil was caused, apparently, by people who thought their computer models were a lot more trustworthy than they turned to be. Prudence would seem to dictate not putting into place immensely expensive policies that could well have the opposite of their intended effect because of what we do not know. If equal headline space were given to record cold, snow and ice that has been given to record heat, rain and flood most people would conclude that the jury was definitely out on whether the planet is warming or cooling. The most prudent presumption, I think, is that these things come in cycles.
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