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> Sadly that puts me in the 'climate control denier' category, that is the group of people who believe that humans cannot control what the climate does (good or

• ChuckMcM 12y ago
  I understand the science of impact. We can take a winter day and make it feel like summer by burning the forest down next to us. I also understand both the models and the limits of our understanding of them. We can take the current model of the climate and change the CO2 levels in it and sometimes reflect what we actually see when those CO2 levels change. We take the anomalies and we try to update the model. Ok so far so good. The models don't tell us why the planet was warm and then it was in an ice age, they don't tell us why it stopped being in an ice age in the first place, they don't tell us anything how our actions (or inaction) could cause the climate to change in a way that we wish it to change. We can speculate on those things, we can track down times in the geologic record where Yellowstone erupted and put dust high up in the atmosphere, we can look at iridium layers in the rocks and try to understand when large asteroids hit the planet and wrought havoc. And perhaps the biggest thing that is missing from the model is how the planet 'resets' itself. We have had warm periods and cold periods and fluxed in between them, but the model doesn't tell us how, the data tells us this happened, but the current model applied to ice cores from a million years ago gives a different answer than the data seems to indicate was true. What all of that adds up to is that "its complicated" and we're inside a system for which we don't have a deep understanding of the variables and we have a scientific infrastructure which is actively discouraging the asking of certain questions or testing various hypothesis which are politically uncomfortable. That makes me think we aren't doing as much as we can to understand the actual system, and our lack of understanding leads to an inability to predict what it will do, or how it will respond to what we do or don't do. We are no more free to ask heretical questions about how climate works than Galileo was free to investigate whether or not the Earth was the center of the universe. As we cannot summon the will to do the research we need to do in order to accurately answer the question of how the system works, I do not believe we will reach a point where we might understand what would be needed to move that system to a pre-determined point from some other known point.
  • bunderbunder 12y ago
    > The models don't tell us why the planet was warm and then it was in an ice age, they don't tell us why it stopped being in an ice age in the first place, they don't tell us anything how our actions (or inaction) could cause the climate to change in a way that we wish it to change. This criticism is somewhat akin to trying to challenge the theory of relativity because our orbital models can't tell us exactly how the planets got arranged how they did. The reason they can't isn't because the models are broken; it's because there are many plausible hypotheses that could give rise to the outcome we see, and representing various possible combinations of historical parameters. And we can't necessarily know which set of parameters without the aid of a time machine. Similarly for the climate models. They can't tell us exactly how every historical change in the climate happened because there are many climate forcings that simply aren't recorded very well (or at all) in the historical record. So we can use the models to come up with various plausible scenarios, but we'd need a time machine to figure out which one is the correct one. To take another analogy, this criticism's akin to when creationists complain of the relative fuzziness of our knowledge of the history of life in the precambrian to argue that evolution cannot account for the major taxonomic divisions in the tree of life. Again, the truth is that the model is fine, what's inadequate is our knowledge of the historical conditions we would need to feed into that model. The distinction between those two sorts of knowledge gap may seem pedantic and hair-splitty, but an understanding of the nature and implications of that difference is one of the boundaries that separates science from pseudoscience.
    • steven2012 12y ago
      The problem is that the models have all been wrong. At what point do you give up and say "the models don't work no matter what we do, maybe the theory is flawed?" They can't explain the past behavior of the Earth's climate, and they can't predict the future behavior. They're not even directionally correct, given the fact that global temperatures, albeit amongst the highest they've been on record, haven't increased since the late 1990s[1]. Given the incredible increase in CO2 over the past 16 years, the models would have predicted much higher temperatures, but it's simply not agreeing with their own data. 1. http://www.politifact.com/rhode-island/statements/2013/aug/25/steve-goreham/global-warming-skeptic-says-global-surface-tempera/ http://www.politifact.com/rhode-island/statements/2013/aug/2...
• Intermernet 12y ago
  The climate has previously (and recently) been altered by human activity, but fortunately we noticed, and thankfully, as of last reports we actually may have fixed this one. "Aside from the direct effect of ultraviolet radiation on organisms, increased surface UV leads to increased tropospheric ozone, as noted above. Paradoxically, at ground-level increased ozone is generally recognized to be a health risk, as ozone is toxic due to its strong oxidant properties." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ozone_hole http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ozone_hole