Global Warming

I realize I may sound like a broken record on this theme, but repetition is one way to teach.

Readers may be aware that I’ve been frustrated in the incredible level of polarization in discussions of global warming and climate change. Personally, I’m willing to accept that there is likely to be some adverse human-generated impact on the global climate, but most of the recent climatological weirdness being hyped is more a result of long-term climate cycles (and random noise), than any slow, underlying human-driven trend.

Some of the changes being sought by climate change activists are ones that I am at least somewhat in favor of. Reduction of polluting emissions, increased efficiency, and a transition to renewable, sustainable fuel sources are good ideas from my point of view, on general principle, even without the threat of climate change.

Thus, I become concerned about the potential backlash should the public react badly to hype turning out to be just that.

For example, a story in The Australian discusses a plateauing in global temperature trends, and how Mother Nature seems to be behaving more resiliently than models predict. The story includes the following comment:

If Marohasy is anywhere near right about the impending collapse of the global warming paradigm, life will suddenly become a whole lot more interesting.

A great many founts of authority, from the Royal Society to the UN, most heads of government along with countless captains of industry, learned professors, commentators and journalists will be profoundly embarrassed. Let us hope it is a prolonged and chastening experience.

With catastrophe off the agenda, for most people the fog of millennial gloom will lift, at least until attention turns to the prospect of the next ice age. Among the better educated, the sceptical cast of mind that is the basis of empiricism will once again be back in fashion. The delusion that by recycling and catching public transport we can help save the planet will quickly come to be seen for the childish nonsense it was all along.

That would be exactly what I’m afraid of. Even if changes aren’t necessary to forestall impending climatological disaster, conservation and more environmentally-friendly tech are good things in their own right. It’d be a shame to see them fall out of favor due to a backlash.

Seen in the Sydney Morning Herald:

Dr William Gray, a pioneer in the science of seasonal hurricane forecasts, told a packed lecture hall at the University of North Carolina that humans were not responsible for the warming of the earth.[...]

“We’re brainwashing our children,” said Dr Gray, 78, a long-time professor at Colorado State University. “They’re going to the Gore movie [An Inconvenient Truth] and being fed all this. It’s ridiculous.”

But Dr Gray, whose annual forecasts of the number of tropical storms and hurricanes are widely publicised, said a natural cycle of ocean water temperatures - related to the amount of salt in ocean water - was responsible for the global warming that he acknowledges has taken place.

However, he said, that same cycle meant a period of cooling would begin soon and last for several years.

I wouldn’t be surprised if the quote oversimplifies what some folks have suggested—that while longer term global warming (whether natural or human driven) is likely occurring, the recent hyped weather oddities could be the result of shorter-term cycles.

If that were to hold true, then when the shorter-term cycles flip over to more normal modes, would popular media and junk science begin to consider the concerns of longer term climate changes to be bunk due simply to lack of understanding of how the different cycles and trends interact with one another?