Of Mice and Hockey Sticks
As a global climate change agnostic, I often find myself disagreeing with most of the polarized views on the subject. I don’t embrace every criticism of either side as another chink in its armor, and I don’t celebrate error, omission and claims of outright deception. Science is often messy, more akin to making sausage from scratch than assembling automobiles in a modern factory.
So my reaction to the latest “hockey stick” kerfluffle I blogged about in Climate Change Change was bit different: I’m glad that it looks like the warming trend may not be as severe as we first feared. If true, it means that we have time to prepare humanity for the changes, and incorporate the twin goals of American energy independence and sound environmental policy. It was a pleasure to find Thomas Fuller’s comments that more closely align with my own beliefs. In his excellent San Francisco Examiner post How global warming looks without the various versions of the Hockey Stick, Fuller sums up the controversy from the same perspective I have:. . . McIntyre’s work leads to the strong suggestion that the warming experienced since 1880 and more emphatically between 1975 and 1998 is real, but not unprecedented. These global mean surface temperatures have been seen, during the Medieval Warming Period and the Roman Warming Period. As those periods of warming occurred without the benefit of human contributions of CO2, it removes some (not all) of the urgency from the arguments about global warming.
This, if true, is an unmitigated blessing, as it will allow us to plan for a future that has hope for the developing world and does not require us to throw the circuit breaker on energy consumption in the developed world. It does not mean we can ignore the issue–we do need to ‘decarbonize’ our way of life, and the sooner the better. But we can, if McIntyre is right, do it at a pace that allows time for adjustment, and continue to fund solutions to other problems as well.
I’m past caring about motives–if Briffa is wrong, let’s find out fast. Let’s find out even faster if he’s right. Whatever political or economic imperatives have been pushing this line of thinking, they need to be either verified or falsified now. If global warming will raise the temperature of this planet by 2 degrees Celsius over the course of this century, it will be a problem. But it’s a vastly different problem than the global warming of 7 to 9 degrees suggested by those who have been most alarmed.
Bravo, Mr. Fuller!
