Barrel Strength

Those of us who follow the debate about global warming, as if it were a debate and not a settled dogma, track the following questions:

1) is it occurring?

2) How much is man engendering?

3) How important is it to solve, and how readily is it solved, relative to all other ecological/disease/development problems?

Roughly speaking, here is what my readings have told me.

1) The earth has been warming since the end of the last ice age, roughly 15,000 years ago (with an extensive break for a micro ice age they call the Younger Dryas from 12-10,000 years ago). Warming may be accelerating in recent centuries. Contrariwise, it has been much warmer in the distant past, and vastly colder in the distant past. We have not yet attained the height of the previous interglacial warming period, when freshwater ponds stood near the Arctic Ocean, which are now called pingoes.

If the recent (last million years) past is any guide, we are currently in the last few millennia before the onset of the next ice age. We have been through 18 ice ages the last million years, with gradually increasing extremes of cold occurring as the ice age has progressed. All of human history, from the invention of agriculture 10,000 years ago, has occurred in the latest interglacial.

More recently, global warming appears to have stopped as of the year 2000, but I don’t read too much into this one way or another, since any general trend in the earth’s climate less than a few hundred years long is generally of no enduring significance. Nevertheless, global warming and cooling can happen suddenly, so that we can be plunged back into an ice age in less than a decade. I cannot reconcile these two statements without recourse to longer explanations than you have time to read.

2) Not much. Having read as much geological history as I have, the claims of many scientists that we are tipping the world over into a heat death strike me as vastly implausible. I also notice that geologists, who are accustomed to dealing with a thousand years as the shortest possible time-span they reckon in, tend to have a distinctly different view of climate than climate scientists, who track weather over time, and deal, in essence, with air, not rock.

3) I side with Bjorn Lomborg that if we had a hundered major global problems to solve, such as malaria, clean drinking water, education for girls etc, global warming would be last on the list in terms of cost-effectiveness of solving. Cold kills more people than heat, every winter, year in, year out.

Now today’s sermon is about the meaning of science. The philosophy of science is that it is only provisionally true. It must frame propositions that can be disproved. If it cannot generate propositions that can be disproved, it is not science. Hence the Wolfgang Pauli insult than some things “are not even wrong” - cannot generate propositions whose truth can be measured against results.

It was intersting to read in the National Post yesterday (”Overheated Claims”) an article by Roger Pielke, a professor of environmental studies at the University of Colorado, citing two US climate scientists, Claudia Tebaldi and Reto Knutti, the following passage, quoted twice:

“It is important to note that climate projections, decades or longer in the future by definition, cannot be validated directly through observed changes. Our confidence must therefore come from other sources”

Would you please read that again and tell me where that confidence should come from? If observed changes over decades fail to track predictions, over decades, then where is our conficence in climate modelling to come from? The operations of the Holy Spirit?

As Pielke observes:
“The IPCC issues predictions for 20-30-year periods in the futiure, and updates them every 6-7 years, so in practice its current predictive capanbilities can never be measured against real world data.”

In short, if you read the words carefully, they are saying that climate predictions are not science, because not falsifiable. This is exactly the thrust of the scientific objection to Intelligent Design.

Hence you will understand my increasing belief that Climate Science has reached the stage of being voodoo for white people. Not just metaphorically, but now, as we cast aside the last links to falsifiability, to pure magical thinking.