“Bread crumbs”(perhaps how you got here)

 Wednesday, December 02, 2009, 08:03

Let’s look at a sample from this morning’s Drudge Report.

Let’s take these items one by one.:

1. The newspaper that claims climate change is a fraud is repeating a charge made by Ian Plimer, a long-standing scientific gadfly. Plimer is a geologist.
2. “Climategate”: refers to the resignation of Phil Jones as director of the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit. Dr. Jones is involved in the leak of some superficially damaging e-mails.
3. The Penn State professor referenced in the third line is Michael Mann, also involved in the supposedly damning e-mails.
4. Senator James Inhofe (R - OK) is the U. S. Senate’s most persistent critic of “Global Warming”.
5. The Australian Parliament’s defeat of a bill relating to global warming is the act of a political body, not a scientific research team.
6. “It’s all unravelling now” is from a column by British right-wing columnist James Delingpole.
7. There really was snow in north Texas.

Not a single charge or headline item mentioned above, other than possibly #1, is a finding of scientific research. Whether Mr. Plimer is qualified to say anything about climate change is not clear. But a reasonable scientific disagreement is hardly an excuse for failure to act.

What is “climate change”? The answer is not that every place on Earth will soon be noticeably hotter. The surface of the Earth is a big place. There will always be differences of climate from one place to another, and there will always be places that experience “unusual” weather. “Climate change” as the term is used these days is a theory that the Earth as a whole is warming up and that at least a significant part of the warming is due to human activities. The theory is, in other words, a statistical generality.

Statistics makes statements about data sets, not about individual data points, although the values of individual data points are used to test statistical hypotheses (and thus theories). There is nothing at all misleading or “unscientific” about a scenario in which some parts of the Earth grow warmer and some grow colder, while as a whole the Earth grows warmer.

None of this would be a particular problem except for the following consideration: those that accept the theory of global climate change also have policy recommendations, based on their finding that human-made emissions of various types are causing the climate change now observed. All of the policy proposals relating to climate change will, in the short run, cost money. There’s the rub, as Hamlet said. People like Plimer (a significant investor as well as critic of climate change) and Inhofe (see Ari Berman in The Nation and Jeff Muskus in Huffington Post) are not exactly clear of charges of conflict of interest. Likewise, with all due respect, as to the Australian Parliament, which can be purchased at least as easily as the U. S . Congress.

There is one final point to be made: what matters? Does snow in North Texas matter more than the well-established theory of global climate change? (See Wikipedia’s article and NASA’s climate pages for examples of evidence.) The answer to “what matters” can be found in any locality that has an oceanic coastline. The sea level is rising everywhere. The answer can be found in ice-pack melt at the poles. The answer can be found in significant disruptions of oceanic currents, disruptions that profoundly affect fisheries and agriculture. All of these things would be true even if there were snow in every city or locality near the Equator, let alone in Texas. Everyone I know can give examples from recent years of miserably cold or snowy conditions. But they don’t matter. What matters is the global phenomenon that makes the sea level change. If you don’t believe it, just go look at Louisiana and its coastal parishes. There can be ten feet of snow in New Orleans, but the Louisiana coastline is still gravely threatened. That matters.

 All text on this page is the work of J W Durham and is licensed only under terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. Other licensing terms may be available. E-mail me