Uh oh. Looks like there’s going to be a showdown in the not-too-distant future. Apparently, in a decade or so, the sun is going to be entering a period of low activity. That’s interesting, but my favorite feature of this article is how it describes the current status of the field of climate research.
The fact that science is many years away from properly understanding global climate doesn’t seem to bother our leaders at all. Inviting testimony only from those who don’t question political orthodoxy on the issue, parliamentarians are charging ahead with the impossible and expensive goal of “stopping global climate change.”
. . .
Climate stability has never been a feature of planet Earth. The only constant about climate is change; it changes continually and, at times, quite rapidly. Many times in the past, temperatures were far higher than today, and occasionally, temperatures were colder. As recently as 6,000 years ago, it was about 3C warmer than now. Ten thousand years ago, while the world was coming out of the thou-sand-year-long “Younger Dryas” cold episode, temperatures rose as much as 6C in a decade — 100 times faster than the past century’s 0.6C warming that has so upset environmentalists.
The article also goes on to talk about emerging research that even more closely correlate the sun’s activity with the global climate. Bizarre thought, isn’t it? That the rate of flow from source of the vast, vast quantity of all of our energy on here on earth might be the primary factor in how warm or cool the globe is?
It’s like I’ve said from the beginning: turning science into politics is not going to be good for anyone, and it most certainly does not get us any closer to the truth.
June 21st, 2007 at 4:34 pm
Pedro, are you opposed to limiting CO2 emissions? Developing alternative fuel sources? Decreasing our reliance on foreign oil?
June 21st, 2007 at 4:49 pm
All other things being equal, I can see an argument for limiting CO2 “just in case”. But all other things aren’t equal. Limit CO2 emissions can be expensive. It’s an economic decision and one that I think governments should stay out of until the science is settled.
Developing alternative fuel sources and decreasing reliance on foreign oil are good ideas no matter what the result of the climate science debate is. In fact, the environment is probably the LEAST compelling of the reasons for these things. If we’re going to dump money into something, it should probably be this.
June 21st, 2007 at 5:34 pm
Well, at least I know now that you are at least as intelligent as I suspected.
I would ask you though, when will we be able to call the science “settled”? I mean, we thought we had that whole “the atom is the smallest thing out there” pretty well settled, and now I here tell that there are quarks and what have you.
I haven’t seen any figures on how expensive it would be (or who would be bearng that cost) to cap emissions, and assuming arguendo that the science isn’t settled, I suppose we can’t really determine the costs/benefits of the whole thing. I guess I err heavily on the “just in case” side.
June 21st, 2007 at 8:11 pm
Settled enough to make decisions on?
I look at it this way: we have a bunch of scientists who think that human-produced CO2 has some impact on the climate. They differ as to what that impact is.
We have a smaller but growing group of scientists who think that there are other factors that are more relevant than CO2.
There might be some cheap things that we can do to reduce emissions. I don’t see any reason not to do those. As the cost increases, though, I think the threshold for certainty should increase as well.
And I mean scientific certainty, not political certainty.