Global warming in a nutshell
A critique of the so-called "global warming" scare that has taken the world by storm
William Gairdner - December 12, 2007
[Editor's Note: To celebrate the end of the U.N. climate conference in Bali, we are reprinting with permission Mr. Gairdner's essay from his website.]
The debate over so-called “global warming” is frustrating.
I am far from an expert, although I do read a fair amount of the science on this topic, and have kept a sizeable file on the pros and cons over the years. My main concerns are the following. I think a good deal of the science is not up to a high standard, not because no earnest efforts are made, but because the subject matter (the entire earth and surrounding atmosphere) is far too vast, the number of fluctuating variables and the time spans too great, and the whole business is so shot through with political sensitivities (primarily of the anti-human, anti-population, anti-industry sort) that serious hypotheses can neither be framed nor tested in a controlled way.
On the political note, it is hard to escape the feeling that a great many global warming proponents are reflex leftists in their political beliefs and anywhere from mildly, to wildly anti-capitalist or even entirely opposed to all facets of western civilization. Spiritually speaking, they usually fall in the camp of neo-romantic nature lovers who, like most of us, despair of seeing their sweet planet earth fouled with human garbage, toxins, effluent, poisons, and the like. So they fight back by clinging to the dream of restoring the Garden of Eden, a beauteous earth as it must have been before humans arrived. There is no harm in this if a cleaner earth can be gotten without harming civilization. The most radical of them, however, are intemperate and to be avoided, for they are green through and through and consider human beings and their materialistic activities to be a kind of biological scourge or plague upon nature that must be eliminated. You can see some startling examples of Radical Green Ideas from their own mouths at the end of this piece.
For less rabid sorts, however, the religion of nature is rooted in the ancient vision of the innocent and half-naked noble savage, free of all need and care, eating fresh fruit and sleeping under an oak tree just after sipping his fill from a fresh babbling brook (or today, perhaps, from a bottle of Pinot Noir around the campfire). In short, at the back of this environmental consciousness (where dire warnings about global warming, excess human population, and filthy industrial activity are linked) a pristine purity beckons. I have felt its pull myself. Who hasn’t? But it is precisely the presence – and prevalence - of certain of these unbalanced and pseudo-mystical motivations that turn up in the “science” of climate change that suggests we ought to question all statements made about global warming (and many other environmentalist claims, too).
In what follows there is an underlying question present. Namely, given that all weather systems are chaotic by definition, and that humans have failed miserably at modeling and predicting the outcomes of even very limited chaotic systems such as river currents, wave action, or even fluctuating water pressure flowing through an ordinary pipe, or clouds forming overhead in the next few minutes … How is any prediction about such a vast and complicated subject possible?
Is the Earth Warming or Cooling?
The consensus now seems to be that some cooling as well as warming has occurred in the last century, and on balance, slightly more of the latter than the former. But I don’t think anyone knows for sure, because on a daily basis the “temperature” of Earth (here, you must specify land surface, ocean, mountain, or atmospheric temperatures) never stays the same. On the sunny side of the globe the sun’s heat at some hundreds of degrees Celsius is intense and is fortunately for us prevented by our thin atmosphere from boiling our blood. On the night side the same atmosphere (thanks to its greenhouse effect) traps the heat raised in the day and, combined with the warmed up soil, water, rock and foliage, prevents cooling that otherwise at minus hundreds of degrees C would freeze us solid by morning. So the entire planet is rolling from exposure to extreme heat to cold every 24 hours. The result is that it is either warming or cooling in millions of different places all the time, night and day. And so, despite what we hear from political agencies such as the “Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change” (IPCC) that there is definitely “global warming,” not all climatologists agree. Some of those who disagree most energetically, such as Dr. Richard Lindzen, and those who participated in the BBC’s “Great Global Warming Swindle” show of March, 2007 were themselves contributors to the latest IPCC report. They say the science in that report is unreliable at best “because there is considerable uncertainty in current understanding of how the climate system varies naturally.” As a result, they conclude, “current estimates of the magnitude of future warming should be regarded as tentative and subject to future adjustments (either upward or downward)” (National Post, Dec. 22, 2006).
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