Thursday, June 30, 2011

Science, or "Science?"

Science, or "Science?"

Science has no place for consensus. "Science" does. In science, one puts forth a hypothesis and then experiments and observations are designed and collated to see if the result fits the predictions made in the hypothesis. In the case of climate science, the IPCC put forth a detailed vision of the future of earth's climate in 1990 and 1995. Those predictions failed. They changed the goalposts in 2001 and again in 2007, yet the conditions still will not conform to the new predictions.

The science that is settled is the physical behavior of CO2 in the laboratory. The "science" that says that we shall see this behavior in world climate is demonstrably false. We have lofted satellites and loosed buoys and balloons in order to get a finer understanding of climate, and the better observational tools have uncovered more failure of the theory. Oceans refuse to heat up, proof that global warming has not been happening for the last decade or so. Storms are way down, again not in compliance with prediction. Corals, sea level, none of these phenomena have acted in line with the predictions. That, in science, means that something is wrong with the hypothesis. It means we need more study.

Since 1988 the global warming movement, in the UN, through the IPCC, and some governments, have been demanding a policy prescription that is nothing short of reducing the expansion of industrial development worldwide. CO2 is a proxy for energy and manufacturing. It is unclear if it would be possible to reduce the amount of this trace gas in any significant way, since this has not been determined. Enforcing CO2 emission reductions will not only require the first world to reduce its standard of living, but, if it were to be effective, it would damn people in the third world to poverty, heating their food with animal dung and wood. For such a draconian regime to be put in place, the science better be right - we had better be confident. We are not confident, in fact we have become less so with better science.

My background in science makes me agnostic about what is happening. I am willing to believe that human activities are having an effect, but there is no way to know today, with the best science we can do, whether humanity is making it warmer or cooler. It has been much colder and hotter on earth in the past - on that there is no debate. Whether or not the climate of the 20th or the 19th century is an optimum that we must strive, at any expense, to maintain, is also something I do not believe that we know.

By all means keep funding research. We need to understand our world better if at all possible. And, once we know what is happening, then we should decide what to do. The true believers in the "science" are practicing a religion, where belief can not be questioned. That is not science.