Amusing unpredictability
I’ll say up front I’m a global warming skeptic. I’m not skeptical about the temperature of the planet, that is to say I accept whatever the temperature happens to be. Only a fool would disbelieve a thermometer. But I am skeptical that the main reason the earth has warmed up a bit is human activity. I simply don’t see scientific proof. And because I don’t see humans as the major cause of all temperature change I find it hard to buy into the hysterical ‘imminent disaster of the world’ scenario.
When I hear that taxation of cow farts will be the salvation of the world I can’t help but giggle.
When we talk about global warming, we’re talking about changes to the climate. Referred to most commonly as ‘weather’. Being a Kiwi I was born on an island that lacks the weather calming influence of a massive desert interior. Which makes the weather quite changeable and me, like so many of my country men and women, a habitual weather watcher. After 40 years or so of watching I have these two observations.
1. Weather bureau’s aren’t very good at predicting weather.
2. It is the nature of weather to change.
As a timely example of point one, I was reading this story in The Guardian newspaper where Scottish government officials were moaning the weather service didn’t give them accurate enough information about an approaching snow storm. People were trapped on roads for up to 17 hours in temperatures as low as -14 degrees celsius. What I found amusing was the defence of the Met Office, saying they gave warning snow could start falling at 5am the next morning at 8:40pm the night before.
Clearly I’m not the only one who has experienced the unreliability of weather predictions. Evidently, the Met office in the UK thinks a prediction 9 hours ahead of time to be pretty acceptable. The Scottish parliament seems less convinced.
In the one state of affairs we have meteorological people who can’t reliably tell us what the climate system is going to do more than about 72 hours in advance. In the other state of affairs we have some scientists with computer models, they change constantly, assuring us they can predict the climate years in advance. How likely does that seem? If they state of science today was advanced enough to know how the entire climate system of the planet worked don’t you think they’d be able to reliably predict tomorrows weather? It seems way more likely someone is over stating how much we know about how the planetary climate system works.
My second observation is that climate has changed in the past. Apparently we’ve recently been through a mini ice age and even have written accounts of extreme winters in europe. One account I read was part of a journal written by an officer in Napoleon’s army, who was writing at the time of the winter retreat from Moscow. It describes extreme cold, where snow falls upwards and men could slice living flesh from a walking horse without it noticing as it froze the wound as fast as it was cut.
You only have to look at places where ancient civilizations once supported huge numbers of people. Places like the Nile delta, where vast amounts of desert now exist. Quite clearly the place changed. It seems to me the very nature of climate is to change. To fight change, well, you might as well build sand castles to hold back the tide
So I find myself unable to gather any enthusiasm for pumping my CO2 into a mine shaft, tax farting animals or wildly curtail my use of petrol by hand cutting the broom and gorse in my gully at home. If some people want to voluntarily change the way they live then all power to them. But I’m less enamored with the self righteous preaching and the curtailing of everyone else’s freedom that seems to surround the global warming crusade.
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