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February 18, 2006

Complex Issues, Simple Conclusions

While surfing the 'net yesterday, I came across a piece over at Balloon Juice discussing a new report that Greenland's ice cap is melting faster than previously believed in which the author commented "People who understand the science more or less agree that dumping carbon into the atmosphere has the effect of warming the Earth." I found that to be a bit presumptuous, since it implies that if you don't subscribe to that point of view you're ignorant. Granting that I do not understand a great deal about climate science, it seems to me the worst form of begging the question to start by determining that global warming is happening and going on from there. I made a comment to that effect and started quite a little discussion. To the great credit of most of the commenters over there, the discussion was marked with very little ad hominem and was quite productive. But what I found particularly interesting was a question posed to me asking what it would take for me to believe that anthropogenic global warming is, in fact, occuring.

I have no strong position on global warming in either direction. The science is simply too complex for me to puzzle out quickly or easily, what with the claims and counterclaims on either side of the debate requiring an inordinate amount of time to work through. To come to a conclusion about global warming seems to require one to simply accept the claims of one side as somehow more valid than the other's with little more than intuition to guide one, assuming one does not have the time or scientific grounding to work through the science. Since I do not have the time to read (and may not have the grounding to understand) all the data regarding climate change, I am not ready to simply accept either side of the debate.

Which leads back to the question at hand: what would it take to convince me that anthropogenic warming is, in fact, occurring? The unfortunate answer is that I'm not sure that there is anything that is likely to convince me beyond a shadow of a doubt, because the question is so complicated. Is it as simple as those who favor anthropogenic warming believe, that minions of the oil companies are just working overtime to confuse the issue? While that is possible, it strikes me as somewhat conspiracy-minded. Are all the people who doubt anthropogenic global warming pawns of the oil company? That seems implausible. Given the complexity of the weather, the idea that the question might still be up in the air seems quite reasonable.

Choosing to withhold judgement on global warming, however, has the same practical effect as choosing to disbelieve it: if we're not sure, we're going to err on the side of not doing anything that would probably cripple our economy. Thus we run into some of the limits of science. Even assuming we could do something to address the rather shameful scientic illiteracy that afflicts a large fraction of the population, scientific questions by their nature take years to resolve. Even things we consider rather simple today, such as plate tectonics, were controversial and in great dispute for decades before being commonly accepted. Unfortunately, unlike plate tectonics, global warming offers the threat of potentially catastrophic changes that could not be reversed easily if at all once the question was resolved. As the author of the Balloon Juice post notes, we may have already passed a tipping point. Therefore, if global warming is anthropogenic and will be significant enough to cause disastrous climate changes, it would be fatal to wait until the evidence was incontrovertible. On the other hand, it could be just as bad to act, damaging the global economy and throwing millions into poverty, only to discover that global warming was not anthropogenic at all, or that its effects were not severe enough to merit the kinds of drastic reductions in greenhouse gas emissions required to eliminate it

So where do we go from here? I prefer to err on the side of doing nothing for the time being, for several reasons. One, environmentalists have been proclaiming doom for better than 30 years now, and have yet to be proven right. While that doesn't mean that the science is wrong by any stretch of the imagination, the near-messianic adoption of global warming as a cause by environmentalists makes me wonder if they may not be wrong again in this case. Two, because if global warming is coming, it seems more likely we will be able to adapt to it if we as a society are well off. Poor societies cannot afford to deal with major change. Rich societies can. Therefore, unless global warming will truly be so catastrophic that it will render the planet effectively uninhabitable for human beings, it may be more cost-effective to adapt to the changes than to attempt to halt them. Having said that, I am open to changing that position if there is clear and convincing evidence that the need for change is too great not to do so, but as noted above, procuring that evidence may be difficult.