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Global Warming: Why Are You Skeptical?
Global warming is not one of my pet issues, although I am becoming more interested in it. Judging strictly from the few conversations I've had with other members of the Church about it, my sense is that Church members tend to disbelieve that humans are causing global warming--or even that the globe is warming at all. Perhaps this is an American phenomenon--maybe the European and/or Asian saints are different. If this skepticism is indeed widespread, I wonder what it is rooted in and I'm hoping you skeptics out there will tell me. I can think of a number of potential reasons:
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1. I have a skeptical attitude toward most of science.
2. It is an issue championed by Democrats, so it is most likely a lie.
3. My favorite conservative talk-radio host doesn't believe it, so I don't.
4. God would not allow humans to cause such problems.
5. God made the earth to be able to take whatever we do to it.
6. I have looked closely at the science and I am just not convinced.
7. Dealing with global warming would involve government regulation of private enterprise, which I oppose.
8. Global warming is a part of the [insert conspiracy here] to dominate [insert object here].
9. If it was a real problem, Pres. Hinckley would alert us to it. Since the Brethren haven't said anything, I'm not worried about it.
You skeptics can comment anonymously if you like--or make up a name so we don't have utter confusion with several different people going by "anonymous". Why are you skeptical about global warming? If we take action (eg. finding alternative energy) what do we lose if human-induced global warming turns out to be wrong?
(BTW, See my last post if you have not already.)
7 comments:
I think a big problem was that people haven't kept up with the science the last 5 years. I used to be very skeptical of global warming. But I kept reading and eventually science was able to answer my doubts.
The other problem is that I think some people conflate the science (whether it is occurring) with the economics and politics (the suggested solutions)
Like Clark, I used to be very skeptical about global warming, probably because it was a cause championed by left-leaning and environmental organizations. They often use the scientific fact as the keystone to their agenda (much like we use Joseph Smith). IF global warming is real, THEN it follows that we need to stop it by imposing huge restrictions on coal-burning and auto emissions.
Conservatives reacted by pretending that all the data is false and hope that the issue will disappear like the rain forest everyone used to be so concerned about.
I think we could have much better discussions if we divorced the scientific question from the political one.
How much are we changing the temperature and can we or do we need to do anything to stop it?
I remember being convinced as a high-school student by a Rush Limbaugh argument: he said that Mt. Pinatubo released more greenhouse gases in 1991 than any human activity up to that point (or something along those lines) so how could human activity be a problem? We need to take the debate away from the pundits and give it back to the scientists.
The question in my mind is "How much of the gloabl warming presently being observed is anthropogenic?" The planet has been warming up since the last major ice age, and in the past hundred or so years people have been doing stuff to put more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, but so has nature (e.g., every time a volcano explodes you get a whole lotta stuff in the atmosphere, and how consistently are oceans soaking up carbon?).
So, OK, the planet is heating up. Why? Is it because I drive a car? Thats where the whole political/social/ethical thing gets intertwined and we people tend to be pretty selfish about maintaining our affluent lifestyle, so yeah, like I am going to start biking to work and filling my tires with compressed nitrogen instead of CO2. Oh, yeah, and I'll stop breathing, burping, and farting too since I dont want to produce any greenhouse gases.
Anyway, one time on my mission I ran into this member guy who told me that all of the environmentalists are just plain crazy because the Lord had already set out the end of the world and how its all going to go down in the book of Revelation so the environmentalists are all a bunch of kooks. He was a member of the John Birch Society.
I studied fluid dynamics in the mid 1990s at Johns Hopkins. One of my dissertation committee members was Marc Parlange from the Department of Geography and Environmental Engineering. He did a lot of work on heat and moisture fluxes from soil surfaces. A couple people on my oral exam board were from the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences. I took a couple of classes in that department, including one from Owen Phillips, a legend in the field who did seminal work on the mechanisms of energy transfer from the wind to the waves. If anyone should be able to form an informed opinion of global warming, I should, and it's not easy, and by the time these matters filter to the newspapers, they're 85% politics.
I've been separate from the academic and environmental domains for a few years, so there may be convincing new work I am not up on, such as Clark refers to. Around the time that Al Gore was running for President and the global warming lobbying agenda was already set, though, there was plenty of room for valid skepticism, the good kind that leads to better models and theories. You may remember the Back Page that Freeman Dyson wrote for the APS News a few years ago. Dyson is unbeatable as a thoughtful scientist and an iconoclast. His article, laying at the big unknowns in global modeling, started by identifying global warming as a new dogma, and therefore worthy of his heresy.
Your last question, "If we take action what do we lose if human-induced global warming turns out to be wrong?", seems a bit dull. Mankind has not risen past the use of fire. It doesn't take an anthropologist to realize that civilization would be very different without combustion.
John,
While doing my graduate work I played with the NASA GISS GCM testing the hypothesis that if the Laurentian ice sheet melted off a particular way and diverted all lot of the fresh water from eastern North America into the northern Atlantic would it shut down the North Atlantic Deep Water (NADW) conveyor, which is the suspected cause of the Younger Dryas. The test was to see if the GISS GCM was sensitive enough to even exhibit the alleged behavior. It didnt perfectly model a complete collapse of the NADW, but it did show a significant change in Northern Atlantic temperatures, salinities, etc. OK, so is it that the the GCM isnt all that great, or were the initial conditions wrong, or was scenario incorrectly modeled? Um, I dunno. I had a hard enough time porting the dang FORTRAN and getting it to run. These GCMs are rediclously complex and extremely touchy to initial conditions, anyone who says they are accurate or representative of anything in the real world is full of bull. We cannot even hardly collect enough data to get a decent weather forecast more than 3 days in advance. Like we can seriously model whats happened over the past several thousand years.
Should we all be more responsable about our consumptive behaviors? Absolutely. But, I'd like to see anyone in US politics, D or R, try to get a serious gas tax passed that would provide sufficient economic disincentive that would result in a change in the average citizens driving behavior or autombile purchase. Not likely. Maybe Hillary can run on that in 08.
I agree that most models are weak. And I certainly don't trust them. But those also seem the least significant evidence for human influenced global warming.
Thanks for the input all.
RT, I suspect as much.
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