I think the bottom line about global warming is that we are deathly afraid of dynamics we don't understand. Our civilization is predicated on a very narrow set of conditions and we don't have the resources to handle major perturbations of those conditions.
Damn, that lost 10 minutes of my life. Not that I don't agree with the article, but I was really reading to get to the part which discusses the concequences of global warming, as suggested in the introduction. But there isn't one.<p>Anyways, it's worth clicking around, he writes some pretty interesting things.
Fundamentally there's one problem that plagues global warming research, and that's that we're grasping at a system so huge and complex that we have absolutely no understanding of it. Sure people believe they understand the system, but spend a month in England and watch how weather forecasts pan out.<p>I don't see how, when some of the biggest computer systems are being used to predict weather systems and we get it wrong, how scientists expect us to believe their computer models that follow less variables and use lots less processing power.<p>All evidence so far says global warming is real, however I can't help but feel all the computer models they use are complete bunk. It strikes me as fraud, it's a computer program and everyone here knows you can get a computer program to do whatever you want. I see it as highly susceptible of bias, which makes it very hard to ever believe their predictions.<p>There's a lot of real science used in global warming research, like using ancient sediments and ice cores to extrapolate how much CO2 was in the atmosphere <i>n</i> centuries ago. However, then we get pseudoscience with computer models of systems infinitely more complex than anything we've ever dealt with; it's akin to comparing a stick figure and a full anatomical diagram of a human down to every capillary for modelling the human body. We're at the stick figure when it comes to the global environment and we're trying to predict somethings effect like we have the whole picture.
Freemand Dyson has another objection to climate modelling: it does not take into account the way climate interacts with biomass. Simple calculations show that even small changes in global biomass absorb huge amounts of atmospheric CO2.<p><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/29/magazine/29Dyson-t.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all" rel="nofollow">http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/29/magazine/29Dyson-t.html?_r...</a>
I'm quite willing to believe that greenhouse gases warm the atmosphere, but I've always wondered how large the effect is compared to the other things that change the climate. Since the earth has been both hotter and colder than it is now, before we even existed, it seems possible that the increase of CO2 from people might not be all that big of a factor. Does anyone have any information along these lines?
I have a simple question, in the spirit of "What evidence would it take to prove your beliefs wrong?": How many years of dropping temperatures does it take before global warming is no longer an acceptable hypothesis?