The case for global cooling

Recently a friend sent me a link to this short article on global cooling. Now, as a piece of journalism, it’s probably the weakest bit of writing I’ve ever seen. More a vague opinion that any factual statement of useful information: However, it did get me thinking enough to write back. Here’s my reply.

About a half degree anomaly over a one-year sample means nothing statistically. I’m interested in the 50- and 100- and 500-year trends. My own conclusions from studying them, be they right or wrong (I’ve no idea which, really): Global warming is happening. And, it probably has little or nothing to do with human activity. And, therefore, while we might be able to influence it doing so would be very, very hard…

Now, the question of whether we should try to influence it is the real debate. If, if the answer is “yes,” I’m pretty skeptical that we actually could do something about it… but then, if our future was facing an ice age or a desert age, maybe for once the planet could cooperate and do something useful about it.

There is a significant body of evidence that says what we are doing to the environment, while bad from our personal perspective (pollution, overfishing, deforestation, overcrowding) in the long run, the planet doesn’t give a damn (watch the Great Global Warming Swindle (also here) for some interesting arguments). Likewise, there is strong evidence that most major climate change — the real ice ages and whatnot — have been brought on by extraterrestrial means. Specifically, most normally occurring climate change coincides remarkably well with increases and decreases in solar output. And of course, there was the problem the dinosaurs had with that chunk of rock. And, then there’s that massive supervolcano that erupted in Asia not so long ago — the cumulative carbon output of which exceeds “all output that mankind has generated, in masse, in the past 50 years.”

I don’t take any of it as gospel though. I tend to be an optimistic pessimist. In other words, I hope for the best and try to plan for the worst. On this principle, one can rarely go wrong… so, accordingly, I think we should be doing everything we can to preserve our future. Let’s fix the things we know aren’t good for us or the planet, at least from our perspective: Stop the pollution, stop overfishing, stop the deforestation. Maybe in the long run we find out all it did was make the place nicer to live in and the air easier to breath. On the other hand, there’s a decent chance we find out it tipped the scales toward avoiding that traumatic climate event. And if not, well, I’ve been to Bangalore and Bombay and the air there was thick enough to gag on. Let’s do something about it.

Bottom line, we don’t know. But as Joel Achenbach points out in the Washington Post, “Certainly there’s no consensus on global warming… There is only abundant uncertainty.” So why aren’t we playing it safe? That’s what I don’t understand, and it’s why I vote with global warming and environmental issues.