Riding the Climate Toboggan
https://www.ecosophia.net/riding-the-climate-toboggan/
Every year or two on this blog I post an update on the global climate. Now and then I wonder if this is a futile effort. Outside the four notional walls of this one little blog on the fringe, and a few other equally marginal venues, the rest of the world seems to be caught up in a debate about the climate that permits two and only two viewpoints. On the one side you have the people who insist that global climate change is an apocalyptic horror that will surely kill us all unless we kowtow to an increasingly baroque and intrusive set of rules that they themselves aren’t willing to follow. On the other side you have the people who insist that global climate change isn’t happening at all. They’re both wrong, but that hardly matters: with every failed prediction—and both sides have made a good many of these—the shrieking from the true believers just gets louder, drowning out the few voices of moderation in between.
Then the moment passes, and perspective returns. One of the great lessons of history is that there really are limits to how long you can talk people into disbelieving the evidence of their own senses. To cite only one example, all those supposedly authoritative claims that the vaccines would keep you from catching or transmitting the Covid virus didn’t keep people from noticing that the vaccines did neither of these things, which is one of several reasons why attempts to push yet another round of Covid vaccines on the public are doing so poorly. In the same way, the rhetoric on both sides of the climate change issue is losing its appeal as people notice that the climate really is changing, but the predicted apocalypse keeps on pulling a no-show.
It’s crucial to remember that the future of global climate does not depend on what people say. (You’d think that the vast amounts of hot air vented by all sides in the dispute would have some effect on the climate, but apparently not.) The future of global climate also doesn’t depend on what the scientific consensus says it is; if the history of science teaches anything, it’s that when there’s a scientific consensus—which is by no means that common—it’s wrong at least as often as it’s right. The future of global climate depends not on any of these things, but on an immensely complex network of feedback loops and planetary processes that are very poorly understood at present, and may be wholly beyond our ability to measure or calculate. There’s a useful source of data that can help us understand where the global climate might be headed, but—well, we’ll talk about that a little later in this post....
