I have a friend who is an environmentalist, but not a scientist, and he is often baffled by my stance on climate change. He says, "how is somebody graduating as a physics major with endeavors to be a scientist not as concerned about climate change?" When I talk to people about climate change, there are three questions I say must be asked (really there are more, but for the sake of argument I just focus on these three.)
Is the warming of the atmosphere and oceans happening? (My answer is yes.)
Is the warming of the atmosphere antrhopomorphic? (My answer is yes.)
What are the effects of this and to what extent are they bad or good? (My answer is that we cannot predict this very well.)
I come to that conclusion because of my knowledge of how these models work, the type of mathematics they use, and the chaotic nature of non-linear differential equations and the initial conditions one has to assume. I then direct people to the Freeman Dyson, who has influenced my perspective a bit. He is the closest esteemed person to hold similar views to me on the topic.
These models then, like the one developed at Princeton University where Dyson is a professor emeritus, are "useful for understanding climate but not for predicting climate."
That's too much of a temptation for scientists working on the problem, however. "If you live with models for 10 to 20 years, you start to believe in them," Dyson said,
http://e360.yale.edu/feature/freeman_dyson_takes_on_the_climate_establishment/2151/
"And there you got a very strong feeling for how uncertain the whole business is, that the five reservoirs of carbon all are in close contact — the atmosphere, the upper level of the ocean, the land vegetation, the topsoil, and the fossil fuels. They are all about equal in size. They all interact with each other strongly. So you can’t understand any of them unless you understand all of them. Essentially that was the conclusion. It’s a problem of very complicated ecology, and to isolate the atmosphere and the ocean just as a hydrodynamics problem makes no sense."
"So they say, ‘We represent cloudiness by a parameter,’ but I call it a fudge factor. So then you have a formula, which tells you if you have so much cloudiness and so much humidity, and so much temperature, and so much pressure, what will be the result... But if you are using it for a different climate, when you have twice as much carbon dioxide, there is no guarantee that that’s right. There is no way to test it."
"Of course. No doubt that warming is happening. I don’t think it is correct to say “global,” but certainly warming is happening. I have been to Greenland a year ago and saw it for myself. And that’s where the warming is most extreme. And it’s spectacular, no doubt about it. And glaciers are shrinking and so on.
But, there are all sorts of things that are not said, which decreases my feeling of alarm. First of all, the people in Greenland love it. They tell you it’s made their lives a lot easier. They hope it continues. I am not saying none of these consequences are happening. I am just questioning whether they are harmful.
There’s a lot made out of the people who died in heat waves. And there is no doubt that we have heat waves and people die. What they don’t say is actually five times as many people die of cold in winters as die of heat in summer. And it is also true that more of the warming happens in winter than in summer. So, if anything, it’s heavily favorable as far as that goes. It certainly saves more lives in winter than it costs in summer."
I think if you dig into the minds of many climatologists you would find that their opinions on this aren't that much different from Dyson's. I think it is certain non-scientists or scientists who don't work with differential equations much who choose one scenario and focus a lot on that scenario while disregarding the other likely scenarios.
I'm interested in other people's thoughts on this?
