… more than politicians

… more than religious leaders and their holy scriptures

… more than the man in the street

… more than my gut

… more than the voices in my head

And you should too.

Today’s post is snipped from a recent discussion I had about energy consumption and the need to reduce it, where I articulated my thoughts on global warming and specifically those who doubt it. I was surprised that a number of workmates were rather cynical about the idea, based on personal observations of weather, winters etc, so felt obliged to pipe up (Sorry for the recycled content; time goes too fast lately)

Observation of global warming is not based on individual persons’ subjective/anecdotal experiences, but rather vast amounts of corroborating data gathered by climate scientists. It does not predict that the world will be uniformly warmer; in fact it predicts that weather will be more random and extreme (higher overall energy in a system means more chaos + turbulence).

Note that even though a lot of people are wondering if the apparent increase in the incidence of monster hurricanes is due to global warming, climatologists are not yet saying that this is definitely the case. This is because they are scientists, not lobbyists, and they are conditioned to test their theories and models as much as possible before attributing causality, and this in turn means that it is completely reasonable to respect the opinions of the vast majority of experts in the field when they say that global warming is happening and that it is affected to a significant degree by human activity.

This is not just an argument from authority (as some would argue) because the authority is in fact a consensus among thousands of scientists from every country and cultural background. Scientific opinion on an issue is not dictated by some supreme council, but by the convergence of research by thousands of individuals. It’s funny how no one questions the consensus on other atmospheric effects, el Nino etc, but when something requires a lifestyle change suddenly everyone is a "skeptic".

Almost all the energy used by humans in the last 100 years has come from fossil fuels… which are all extracted from the ground, and are all based on carbon. That carbon is not leaving the planet, but neither is it going back into the ground (nor transmuting into other elements)– so where is it? The bulk of it is either in the atmosphere or dissolved in the ocean, the net effect of which is that the atmosphere traps more heat and the ocean is more acidic (causing corals and anything that has to form a carapace to suffer, because they dissolve too easily as acidity rises).*

As complicated and flawed as models and simulations are, basic physics and chemistry tells us that we can′t keep taking all the carbon out of the ground without expecting consequences.

Plus, the more we use fossil fuels the faster we run out (and the more painful it will be) and then we will be totally screwed.

I should elaborate here: when I say I trust scientists, I mean simply that the qualified opinion of a scientist (and especially a large number of scientists) is more likely to be true than an opinion ventured by just about anyone else you can think of, and ironically it is also more likely to be accompanied by an acknowledgement of uncertainty.

Certain people like to harp on the idea that Hitler was inspired by Darwin’s theory of evolution, and although I think that this connection is total bullshit (did Hitler even mention Darwin?), what difference would it make if he was? Would it make evolution any less true?

Science isn’t about telling you what you want to believe; it’s about finding out how things are, and wherever possible understanding why they are so. Science is more concerned with truth than any other discipline and yet, unlike religion and politics, science is often the last to assert any particular truth, because humility is built right in to the scientific method.

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* Interestingly, if we started growing forests just for fuel (ie burning wood) that would at least be carbon neutral, since all the carbon in a tree is effectively coming out of the atmosphere in the first place. I′m guessing the particulate pollution would cause overwhelming health problems though…