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• Wednesday, January 14, 2009 12:34 PM

  @@NewHavenette

  says

  "Perhaps you are so suffocated by the CO2 spewing from Al Gore's mouth, you are incapable of appreciating a JOKE?"

  [in reference to a denial based on it's cold outside]

  If it was a joke why isn't it funny?

  and says:

  "Not sure about you, but I actually READ scientific articles about such things as equatorial glaciers and sediment layers."

  Those aren't scientific articles.

  And to be sure about me: I'm a physicist old enough to have read the first global warming articles and said "thin theory on weak data." I have no job interest in the question, only interest in my own quality of life.

  In the last thirty years the data and calculations have consistantly improved. The questions have narrowed and the

  uncertainties have shrunken. The deniers have retreated from "it's wrong," to "what about this" to "maybe it won't be as big as predicted because maybe this would have a counteracting effect" to "it will cost too much," while failing to consider the costs of doing nothing.

  The prediction problem has never been one of unknown physics but rather the complexity of prediction for the exact system of topography and atmosphere we have. The theory of the formation of clouds is nearly 100 years old, but including the

  details of the reflectivity and location of every cloud formed in response to changes in temperature, flow, pressure and water content used to be way too much information. Computers are about one trillion times faster and bigger than 30 years ago. At the same time, the historical climate information used to test models has similarly improved. Now you can do a model including where continents were 100M years ago and get a pretty good reflection of climate data. Similarly, you can reproduce the detailed climate for the last few hundred years, without free parameters.

  It seems that climate change denial never seems to come from real climate study but always seems to arise from personal philosophy. One of: it's wrong to change the world except how we are already changing it or it's our right to change the world but we shouldn't change to avoid approaching problems because we've always lived this way, or we're so small compared to God, we should do whatever we want because we can't possibly change anything.

  —bcwbcw Read bcwbcw's other letters
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