Hinkle: Global Warming

No one should be happier about a decade-long pause in global warming than climate-change alarmists. After all, the prospect that they might have been wrong all along could mean that mankind need not face a choice between environmental devastation on the one hand or a draconian regime of taxes and regulation on the other. To find that anthropogenic (i.e., man-made) global warming is, in fact, not occurring should be like learning you got a false positive on a cancer screening. A crisis averted -- break out the champagne!

But many are not happy. "There can be no argument" that temperatures have plateaued, says Mojib Latif of Germany's Leibniz Institute, adding glumly, "We have to face that fact." (Face it? Why not celebrate it?) Nor are they happy about the release of pirated files from the Hadley climate center at the University of East Anglia in Britain.

Those files contain embarrassing e-mails in which various climate scientists discussed how to avoid Freedom-of-Information-Act requests, suppress the writings of climate-change skeptics ("Kevin and I will keep them out [of the next IPCC report] somehow -- even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!" wrote the head of the Hadley center), misrepresent data ("I'll maybe cut the last few points off the filtered curve before I give the talk again, as that's trending down as a result of the end effects and the recent coldish years"), stop journals from printing climate-change skepticism, and punish those journals that do. Conceded one: "The fact is that we can't account for the lack of warming at the moment. and it is a travesty that we can't." A travesty?

Now, there are two principal explanations as to why those who are deeply concerned about climate change are not happy about the leveling-off of global temperatures.

The first is that, as Time recently insisted, "global warming is real, it's happening now, and if we don't act soon, the consequences are likely to be catastrophic." In this scenario, the current caesura does not cancel out the long-term trend any more than a single bad day on Wall Street cancels out the long-term upward slope of the stock market. But the current plateau will lend -- in fact, already has lent -- credence to climate-change deniers, foster complacency, and therefore make catastrophe all the more likely. (Assuming for the sake of argument that warmer temperatures spell catastrophe.)

The second explanation lies in Popperian falsificationism -- a fancy way of saying all scientific explanations are subject to disproof. An apple falling down from a tree 100 times lends credence to the theory of gravity, and 1 million apples falling down from a tree lend it much more credence. But the first time an apple falls up from a tree, it's time to look for a better theory. A continued cooling trend would be global warming's upward-falling apple.

There is a third possibility: Global warming is real, it's happening now, and we have nothing to do with it -- temperatures on a four-billion-year-old planet rise and fall independently of mankind's puny input. In support of that notion, n.b. the little ice age that ended around 1850, and the fact that a half-million years ago, atmospheric CO2

levels were roughly 10 times higher than they are now. Perhaps we are just along for the ride.

We do know that some of the more alarmist rhetoric has been compromised, at the least. Two years ago the press reported that "global warming is accelerating three times more quickly than feared." Well, no. A National Academy of Sciences report showed that carbon-dioxide emissions had been increasing about three times as fast this decade as they had been during the 1990s. But if temperatures have been stabilizing even as man-made CO 2 emissions have been accelerating, then that would seem to throw cold water on the entire premise of human causation.

Or not. Last year Latif wrote a paper about how ocean current patterns called the meridional overturning circulation may align in such a way as to produce short-term cooling despite long-term trends. And the Fourth Assessment Report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, produced in 2007, shows an unequivocal long-term rise in global temperatures that, it says, is "very likely due to" human carbon-dioxide emissions. The scientific consensus holds, for now. That ought to swing a lot of weight with conservatives who have, over the years, lectured liberals about "sound science" concerning silicone breast implants, Alar, and so on.

On the other hand, science is not subject to majority rule. So it is at least possible that the skeptics who say some other explanation, such as fluctuating solar irradiation, accounts for global temperature changes might be correct. And it does not inspire confidence to see scientists trying to suppress dissenting voices by any means necessary. Because as Popper pointed out, a scientific theory that cannot be falsified is really not science at all.

My thoughts do not aim for your assent -- just place them alongside your own reflections for a while.

--Robert Nozick.

Contact A. Barton Hinkle at (804) 649-6627 or .