On Nature, Observation, and Arrogance

The Washington Post has another article on the Coming Global Warning Apocalypse that’s worth reading, if for no other reason than to keep up on the latest hysteria. I’m not kidding. You’ll find phrases in this “news” article like “encroaching disaster”, “canaries in the coal mine of global warming”, and “a disaster movie” that’s “not fiction”. And those are just the phrases written by the reporter. When you ge to the quotes from the experts, the panic gets even bigger. You find statements like this:

When the Larsen B, an Antarctic ice shelf the size of Rhode Island, collapsed in 2002, “it was a big glaring clue that something not natural was happening,” said Hugh Ducklow, director of ecosystems for MBL Laboratories in Woods Hole, Mass. “The geological evidence suggested that was stable for at least 10,000 years, back to the last ice age. And it literally disintegrated in three weeks.”

This quote strikes me as unscientific because it assumes far too much. More on that after the jump.

Let’s assume that our models are correct and the sheet had been stable for 10,000 years. That’s 10,000 years on a planet that’s had a working climate for how many millions or billions of years? Can we really discount that what happened to the ice shelf was natural when we’re basing our knowledge on what we believe happened to it for such an infinitesimal percentage of its total existence? Of course we can’t any more than a doctor can diagnose your cold by examining you for a microsecond. Ducklow can’t possibly know what is natural for the Ross Ice Shelf. He doesn’t have nearly enough information to make even a good educated guess.

That’s what’s really wrong, aside from the hysteria posing as news, in articles like this. We live on a planet that’s existed for longer than we can really comprehend. Its climate operates on a cycle the length of which we can only guess, mostly because evidence of those cycles has a limited lifespan. We base much of what we know on what the human experience has been (see the reference to Robert Peary at the beginning of the article) frequently ignoring that what we have seen is only part of the story. Climate Science is growing in leaps and bounds but, folks, there is no way in the universe that we can say right now whether what happened to the Ross Ice Shelf is natural or not. We can’t say whether the receding ice in the Arctic is a natural phenomenon or whether we’re making it happen. We simply can’t say most of what the global warming alarmists claim with any large degree of scientific certitude. Heck, we can’t even predict the weather in your home town more than three days in advance with any real degree of accuracy. It’s incredibly arrogant to say that we can explain hundreds of millions of years of climate based on a couple hundred years of observation. That’s a level of arrogance that makes me very uncomfortable, especially since those who are making the bold pronouncements of doom want to slave most of the world’s economy to slowing down a freight train whose size we can barely guess.

The most any reasonable scientist can say is that the climate that we have known for the past few centuries is changing. We may well wish to keep the climate just the way it is. That’s certainly a discussion we should have, with wide open eyes and full awareness of the likelihood of success, the cost of the attempt, and the chance and possible outcomes of failure. That’s far from the discussion we’re having, if discussion there is. Most MSM outlets treat manmade global warming as a fait accompli and completely ignore the legitimate scientists who have cast doubt on the theory all along the way (or worse, denigrate those scientists with smears and innuendo).

I’ve often called the global warming alarmists a “church” and I stand by that characterization. Folks like the reporter who wrote this article, and many of those quoted therein are no different than the crazy man who stands on the street corner, ringing his bell and wearing a sign that reads “The End is Nigh”. And they are equally impervious to reason and discussion because their dogma can not stand the possibility that they may be wrong.

(via Hot Air)

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Category: Featured, Oh the Climate, It is A-Changin'