It’s awfully cold for global warming

The nation has been in this deep freeze, for the most part, this past week or so, and I’ve heard jokes about the simultaneous global warming frenzy. Everywhere, the media are running serious analyses and projections about how bad things might get with global warming and what mankind might do about it. But here and there, some skeptical voices are questioning how much of it is true science, how much is hype, and what the explanations for it all may be.

Like, here.

So yeah, I’m a global warming skeptic. Why? Well, this sort of thing:

“Maybe for the same reason we believed, 30 years ago, that global cooling was the biggest threat: a matter of faith. “It is a cold fact: the Global Cooling presents humankind with the most important social, political, and adaptive challenge we have had to deal with for ten thousand years. Your stake in the decisions we make concerning it is of ultimate importance; the survival of ourselves, our children, our species,” wrote Lowell Ponte in 1976.

I was as opposed to the threats of impending doom global cooling engendered as I am to the threats made about Global Warming. Let me stress I am not denying the phenomenon has occurred. The world has warmed since 1680, the nadir of a cool period called the Little Ice Age (LIA) that has generally continued to the present. These climate changes are well within natural variability and explained quite easily by changes in the sun. But there is nothing unusual going on.

Since I obtained my doctorate in climatology from the University of London, Queen Mary College, England my career has spanned two climate cycles. Temperatures declined from 1940 to 1980 and in the early 1970’s global cooling became the consensus. This proves that consensus is not a scientific fact. By the 1990’s temperatures appeared to have reversed and Global Warming became the consensus. It appears I’ll witness another cycle before retiring, as the major mechanisms and the global temperature trends now indicate a cooling.”

Marc Vander Maas over at Acton concludes by having a little fun with the hypothesis that global warming is actually caused by the sun. (“Imagine that,” he says.)

But Dr. Ball’s article went on to make an additional and important conclusion that needs attention. The news consuming public only gets the information assembled daily by the “pack journalism” mentality of the media, and with the requisite hype the pack directs. Critical thinking skills are in short supply there, and whoever questions the hype is usually marginalized.

Until you have challenged the prevailing wisdom you have no idea how nasty people can be. Until you have re-examined any issue in an attempt to find out all the information, you cannot know how much misinformation exists in the supposed age of information.

I was greatly influenced several years ago by Aaron Wildavsky’s book “Yes, but is it true?” The author taught political science at a New York University and realized how science was being influenced by and apparently misused by politics. He gave his graduate students an assignment to pursue the science behind a policy generated by a highly publicised environmental concern. To his and their surprise they found there was little scientific evidence, consensus and justification for the policy. You only realize the extent to which Wildavsky’s findings occur when you ask the question he posed. Wildavsky’s students did it in the safety of academia and with the excuse that it was an assignment. I have learned it is a difficult question to ask in the real world, however I firmly believe it is the most important question to ask if we are to advance in the right direction.

We need more people – especially in power politics, academia, science and media – asking the right questions.