26 June, 2007

Global warming (or will it rain this weekend?)

Emily Yoffe writes in the Washington Post:

Since I hate the heat, even I was alarmed by the recent headline: “NASA Warns of 110-Degrees for Atlanta, Chicago, DC in Summer.” But I regained my cool when I realized the forecast was for close to the end of the century. Thanks to all the heat-mongering, it’s supposed to be a sign I’m in denial because I refuse to trust a weather prediction for August 2080, when no one can offer me one for August 2008 (or 2007 for that matter).

There is so much hubris in the certainty about the models of the future that I’m oddly reassured. We’ve seen how hubristic predictions about complicated, unpredictable events have a way of bringing the predictors low.

Speaking of hubris, I was born in December 1973 in what I am told was the coldest day in North India in many years. And that was about the time when Global Cooling was the rage everywhere. The same certainty, the same hubris.

Of course, I’m not saying that global warming is not happening: there’s no doubt that it is. But some of the forecasts and doomsday scenarios seem baseless and wildly exaggerated. Ronald Bailey writes on the subject in his review of Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth here, in which he points out that while Gore is right on the broad issue of the existence of global warming, he overstates the specifics somewhat.

For some of the recent history of climate-change skepticism, I recommend you check out The Skeptical Environmentalist by Bjorn Lomborg. (Here’s a review of it by Denis Dutton.) Also, read Swaminathan Aiyar’s “Global Warming or Global Cooling?” and “The Theology of Global Warming” by James Schlesinger.

Of course, what one believes may also depend on one’s existing worldview, which makes most arguments on it pointless, as they become discussions of faith as much as science. This may apply as much to skeptics as to alarmists. Cantankerous complications cascade.

Meanwhile, will it rain this weekend? Who knows?