Mar 05
Climate change and global thing-ing
John Hobbins posts on a topic I’ve been meaning to cover for some time and not quite got round to. I too am something of a sceptic, and like him note the range of contradictory evidence around, summed up in the paradox of the rapid calving of the Antarctic ice shelf at the same time as the continental ice cap there is the thickest it has been according to known records. The sheer range of the contradictory evidence, however, makes me sceptical of any overarching theory. Most of what is said on both sides of this argument doesn’t sound to me like a full explanation. So in the interim I make the following observations.
- I find it hard to trust any climate prognosis for the next fifty years when those made for the next week are so inaccurate.
- There is a fairly large amount of money in this field of research, and scare stories tend to help shake the money loose, especially from governments and foundations.
- There is an even larger amount of money around in the businesses who resist environmental expenditure as economically damaging, and they too are paying for research.
- The global climate is such a complex system, that chaos theory should make us suspicious of simple cause and effect explanations.
- We should learn to distrust the media need for simple sound-bite stories. Those that carry the most dramatic illustrations are the ones we need to be most suspicious of. Emotional and graphic depiction easily results in the suspension of reason.
- It would be both foolish and arrogant of humans to assume that they don’t need to pay attention to their environment and accept that carelessness may lead to adverse impacts.
- Christian stewardship and the biblical vision of the human vocation as priests of creation demands that we accept the responsibility to manage the planet for the best advantage of all, and that dismissing environmental issues is as much a heresy as it is anything else.
Christians shouldn’t need scaring into caring for God’s garden.
March 6th, 2008 at 1:03 pm
Those are good thoughts. Yes, we are to be good stewards regardless. But, the data is in and there is a sound basis for the assertion that human activity is affecting and will continue to affect our weather. Many of our common sense thoughts, for example the one expressing distrust of long term prediction because near predictions are so difficult, have legitimate answers. No one cannot tell you when a particular radioactive atom will decay but you can rest assured that an aggregate of the same type will have a definite characteristic half-life. And, climate models don’t attempt to predict short term weather. They address something different.
March 7th, 2008 at 10:33 pm
I’m unconvinced by the analogy of half-life. The difference surely is that half-life is a statistical probability for a very large population of atoms, whereas there is only one climate.
March 8th, 2008 at 12:41 pm
Greetings Doug. Climate predictions of temperature are for an average of statistically varying large samples of time and location. Thank you for a thoughtful and edifying blog.