Global Warming Prophecies
As an agnostic on the global warming debate, I’m often amused by the stridency of those claiming a scientific high ground. The test of anyone trying to tell the future is, well, if that future comes true or not. To put it in religious terms:
When the word of the prophet shall come to pass, then shall the prophet be known, that the Lord has truly sent him. (Jeremiah 28:9)
Those embracing “scientific consensus” will bristle at that quote since they are not merely religious, but have the weight of “scientific consensus” on their sides.
The problem is that after dire warnings from non-scientists adhering with religious fervor to the cause, some of the predictions are not coming true. Warming isn’t happening as they anticipated, as the BBC’s Tom Fielden’s blog notes:Far from suggesting the planet will get warmer, one of the world’s leading climate modellers says the latest data indicates we could be in for a significant period of steady temperatures and possibly even a little global cooling.
Professor Mojib Latif, from the Leibniz Institute of Marine Sciences at Kiel University in Germany, has been looking at the influence of cyclical changes to ocean currents and temperatures in the Atlantic, a feature known as the North Atlantic Oscillation. When he factored these natural fluctuations into his global climate model, professor Latif found the results would bring the remorseless rise in average global temperatures to an abrupt halt. “The strong warming effect that we experienced during the last decades will be interrupted. Temperatures will be more or less steady for some years, and thereafter will pickup again and continue to warm”.
Scientists have most often couched their language to consider this kind of possibility, but not the non-scientist adherents who have popularized the message. Politicians and environmental activists seem to embrace the global warming hypothesis for other reasons, like protection of the environment, energy independence, etc. And in their strident, almost religious advocacy they have painted themselves into a corner.
The good news is that a scientific consensus seems to be forming that we have 10 to 30 years to transition away from releasing greenhouse gasses for energy production, and can prevent the warming the scientists still think is a strong possibility in the future. We don’t have to kill every other person to reduce our “carbon footprint”, or throw the entire mid-west and northeast into a serious depression by immediately ceasing the use of coal. We can let market forces and gentle government nudging move us toward cleaner energy production and energy independence. Ever since the Puritans landed and worried that hidden witchcraft threatened society, religious and non-religious Americans have held a sense of impending doom unless we do something. From Cotton Mather to Joe McCarthy to Al Gore, the American penchant for believing in pending apocalypse remains. The new models actually give me more hope than before. Rather than being “too late” and past a “tipping point”, we can work toward solutions. Increasing clean domestic energy production, replacing coal on a reasonable time table (or finding a way to use it without releasing mercury and other toxins into the air) and freeing ourselves from reliance on the middle east for oil are noble and reasonable goals. And if the scientist’s finally have their models fine-tuned, we also avoid global warming (if it exists).