Climate Change
As George Will points out, climatologists and meteorologists have spoken, the debate about climate change is over, the media are all agreed that it's a terrible crisis, and something must be done immediately, if not sooner because time is running out! The stampede is on!
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2006/04/cooler_heads_needed_on_warming.html
I think what quotes like these demonstrate is that there is geological time, and there is human time, and they are very, very different. Like other animals, our necessary routines and biological needs recur on schedules measured in hours or days, not millennia or eons. It is inevitable that evolution would have fitted us with sensory and perceptual capabilities that reflect those short time scales. As a result, hours and days have reality for us, but a century -- a mere geological nanosecond -- is too long to be more than an abstraction. I think the climate change debate is suffused with fundamental misapprehensions because of this. My guess is that even a few thousand years of tree rings or Antarctic ice are not worth much in this context.
The public debate and viewing-with-alarm we see in the media seem to me almost entirely worthless. We talk as if we are conceiving of vast time scales, but we really aren't, because we can't. Geological time is literally beyond our intuitive comprehension. That's for the same reasons we can't intuitively understand quantum physics or interstellar distances -- our mental searchlights just weren't built to shine there. How could it be otherwise? Like all surviving species, successful adaptation means that we know the world as we have needed to know it. The necessities of survival, and the schedules on which those occur, necessarily have fitted us to accurately comprehend some aspects of the world, but not others. So we easily and intuitively comprehend cycles of short duration, like diurnal or seasonal ones, but not cycles that last tens or hundreds of thousands of years. When we think about climatological change, we can't help but think about in a perceptual framework that is, in geological time, ridiculously short. In doing that, we vastly distort and misunderstand the time scales actually involved, and it's almost impossible for us not to interpret local fluctuations and blips as if they were geologically significant changes.
None of this means that significant climate change is not occurring, it just means that any conclusions about that are highly suspect. Of course, it can be argued that, in that case, we should assume the worst and make policy accordingly. But that approach should be evaluated in terms of the costs and benefits of particular policies, compared with the returns to alternative social and technological investments. I doubt that most of the things being proposed to Stop Global Warming would fare well under that kind of scrutiny.
Byron
Science magazine (Dec. 10, 1976) warned of "extensive Northern Hemisphere glaciation." Science Digest (February 1973) reported that "the world's climatologists are agreed" that we must "prepare for the next ice age." The Christian Science Monitor ("Warning: Earth's Climate is Changing Faster Than Even Experts Expect," Aug. 27, 1974) reported that glaciers "have begun to advance," "growing seasons in England and Scandinavia are getting shorter" and "the North Atlantic is cooling down about as fast as an ocean can cool." Newsweek agreed ("The Cooling World," April 28, 1975) that meteorologists "are almost unanimous" that catastrophic famines might result from the global cooling that the New York Times (Sept. 14, 1975) said "may mark the return to another ice age." The Times (May 21, 1975) also said "a major cooling of the climate is widely considered inevitable" now that it is "well established" that the Northern Hemisphere's climate "has been getting cooler since about 1950."
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2006/04/cooler_heads_needed_on_warming.html
I think what quotes like these demonstrate is that there is geological time, and there is human time, and they are very, very different. Like other animals, our necessary routines and biological needs recur on schedules measured in hours or days, not millennia or eons. It is inevitable that evolution would have fitted us with sensory and perceptual capabilities that reflect those short time scales. As a result, hours and days have reality for us, but a century -- a mere geological nanosecond -- is too long to be more than an abstraction. I think the climate change debate is suffused with fundamental misapprehensions because of this. My guess is that even a few thousand years of tree rings or Antarctic ice are not worth much in this context.
The public debate and viewing-with-alarm we see in the media seem to me almost entirely worthless. We talk as if we are conceiving of vast time scales, but we really aren't, because we can't. Geological time is literally beyond our intuitive comprehension. That's for the same reasons we can't intuitively understand quantum physics or interstellar distances -- our mental searchlights just weren't built to shine there. How could it be otherwise? Like all surviving species, successful adaptation means that we know the world as we have needed to know it. The necessities of survival, and the schedules on which those occur, necessarily have fitted us to accurately comprehend some aspects of the world, but not others. So we easily and intuitively comprehend cycles of short duration, like diurnal or seasonal ones, but not cycles that last tens or hundreds of thousands of years. When we think about climatological change, we can't help but think about in a perceptual framework that is, in geological time, ridiculously short. In doing that, we vastly distort and misunderstand the time scales actually involved, and it's almost impossible for us not to interpret local fluctuations and blips as if they were geologically significant changes.
None of this means that significant climate change is not occurring, it just means that any conclusions about that are highly suspect. Of course, it can be argued that, in that case, we should assume the worst and make policy accordingly. But that approach should be evaluated in terms of the costs and benefits of particular policies, compared with the returns to alternative social and technological investments. I doubt that most of the things being proposed to Stop Global Warming would fare well under that kind of scrutiny.
Byron
posted by Byron | Sunday, April 02, 2006
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