Parting the Climate Clouds
Leave it to The Economist to publish the most level headed and informative article on the current state of the climate change debate. I HIGHLY recommend anyone interested in, or confused about, climate change (this includes me) to give this a fair read - its long but well written for being so information oriented.
Past months have been rife with sensationalized hype of ‘climate conspiracies’ in the wake of what was predictably dubbed Climategate. The suspect credibility of the Hockey Stick Graph, followed soon after by the IPCC grossly misjudging when Himalayan glaciers would melt, are the two issues at hand here. Sceptics would like to believe that the uncertainty of this data (or LIES! depending upon who you ask) is enough to refute the agreed upon trends of an entire line of science. With our entertainment oriented media at the wheel and our scandal loving selves back seat driving we managed to eliminate all but the smallest trace of information. Forget what these two discrepancies mean to climate science, lets find out who we can publicly linch and how we can leverage this politically.
Thankfully this article was meant for adults who would actually like to take a logical and reasoned look at what this means for climate science, and our reaction to it, as we move forward. When recent scandals events are taken into consideration in the broader picture of science, we see their impact may not be so substantial after all.
A principle notion here, is that science is inherently uncertain and that simply because we cannot KNOW for certain the intricate details of the earth’s climate does not mean we cannot make educated assumptions. To date, climate science has done a pretty good job of showing that our actions (mainly CO2 emissions) and subsequent ‘side effects’ of a changing climate, have led to overall warming. The issue is how much warming and by when, and this, we are not certain about. The IPCC, with some decent statistical variability, sees warming potential at between 1.1 and 6.4 degrees celsius by 2100 - one is negligible, the other is probably catastrophic. The point is, the uncertainty of climate science is reason to act, not deny.
