On certainty

Some questions to the reader:
Can science prove human causation of global climate change? If so why are we still arguing about it? If not, is there any scenario in which we can accept some degree of scientific uncertainty? Has the bulk of scientific opinion been wrong before? If so, does this make science unreliable? Is it somehow foolish or ethically wrong to accept benefits from science without question, but shun science’s warnings?

Clouded

It's been overcast the last couple of nights, a fact that has me thinking about the night sky, rather than looking at it. The people have been on my mind more than the numbers, the tall-tale factoids, and the Weird Terrain.
I recall those who set about modeling the sky: Newton with his audacious claim and his big letter G; Einstein with his hip trick for the orbit of Mercury; Kepler and all of those ellipses, spheres, and cubes. I remember my freshman year heroes: Oort, Kuiper, Carolyn Shoemaker, and Hyakutake (that lucky cat).
This lineage of thinkers finally drifts past Copernicus and pauses at Galileo. I see in the life and legacy of Galileo Galilei a parallel with present debates about the origins of the world we know. Galileo was branded a heretic for his assertion that the Earth orbits the Sun, a fact that the Church disputed based solely upon their interpretation of religious writings.
People should believe as they will- many traditions of belief hold insight. (For my own part, I find Christianity, Western science, and Taoism to be particularly apt.) Moreover, we should engage in a meaningful dialogue over differences in our paradigms and should avoid mindless dogma. Belief should remain sincere.
I see an unfortunate trend among my friends and family who choose a literal interpretation of the creation story in the Abrahamic faiths. There is a pattern of extrapolating pararational dissent over the sciences that speak of evolution to those sciences that discuss climate change. Indeed there are relationships between these trains of thought, though there are similar linkages to the sciences that find fossil fuels and the sciences that develop new drugs and biologics. Leading a selective theological assault only against those scientific conclusions that are socially or politically unpalatable lacks sincerity in practice.
Perhaps more theologically important, I fear this debate undermines the core values of some of the world’s most populous and influential religions. Just as a literal interpretation of biblical cosmology against Galileo’s (and Copernicus’) conclusions continues to detract from the relevance of Christian thought, so too does the debate over origins, and more urgently, the antagonism toward climate science. This hostility erodes an opportunity to improve peoples' lives.
More than three centuries after the Church condemned Galileo for suggesting that the Earth did indeed orbit the Sun, and more than two decades after humans walked on the surface of the Moon and saw this with their own eyes, Pope John Paul II, speaking for the Roman Catholic Church, observed:
"In the last century and at the beginning of our own, advances in the historical sciences made it possible to acquire a new understanding of the Bible and of the biblical world. The rationalist context in which these data were most often presented seemed to make them dangerous to the Christian faith. Certain people, in their concern to defend the faith, thought it necessary to reject firmly-based historical conclusions. That was a hasty and unhappy decision...It is a duty for theologians to keep themselves regularly informed of scientific advances in order to examine if such be necessary, whether or not there are reasons for taking them into account in their reflection or for introducing changes in their teaching.
"The error of the theologians of the time, when they maintained the centrality of the earth, was to think that our understanding of the physical world's structure was, in some way, imposed by the literal sense of Sacred Scripture..."
(A full transcript of the English translation of the Pope’s remarks is available here.)
Religion and the sciences are not inherently mutually antagonistic. Moreover, these two wisdom traditions complement one another: The scientific method does not explicitly contain an ethical framework. It asks questions like "can we do this?" but often fails to ask, "should we do this?" Contrarily, religion generally lacks systematic natural inquiry and technique. It handily foments discussion over the ethics of creating a vaccine, but offers little or no insight on how one might accomplish this.
The turf war solves no problems and succeeds only in creating hostility and dividing people. It also ignores what each of these systems of belief actually want: understanding and a better world.

It's not academic

I’ve heard a great deal of "so what?" about climate change, lately. Many people hear terms like "general circulation model", "albedo", and "aeronomy", and shrug their shoulders. Even as physical sciences go, these concepts can be fairly abstract. Moreover, we all remember hot days and cold days, and we’re fairly hard-pressed to remember how many of each we had last year. The reader can’t look out the window and "see" climate change.
Or can we? Climate drives a dizzying array of physical and biological processes. It’s impossible to overstate the relationship between climate, ecology, and adaptation. I’ll spare the reader my normal purple prose, and instead focus on this image.
This MODIS image published by NASA shows African dust blowing across the Atlantic Ocean, to be deposited in the Caribbean Sea. Higher temperatures yield more airborne African dust, and more energetic winds to carry it. This dust clouds the clear Caribbean waters, interferes with algae and coral, and has been linked to coral reef die-offs. The reef die-offs directly impact the livelihood of local fishermen.
I urge the reader to look past the sometimes confusing details of mathematics and science for a moment and focus on what scientists are actually concerned about: quality of life and livelihood across our human family. Is this not worth our time and consideration?

The importance of being earnest

The talking heads have been all over the airwaves with renewed zeal since Hollywood decided it’s getting warmer. (Never mind that those who actually understand and advance the natural sciences have been talking about this for years.) Now that the issue of climate change has once again entered the public awareness, the media have facilitated a wave of debate, primarily among people who are not scientists.
I’ve heard those who believe the weight of current scientific opinion declare victory and describe any further discussion as "beating a dead horse." I’ve heard those antagonistic to the research on climate say, "this is just what I believe and nothing you say can change my mind." There remain other skeptics, as there should in our system of science, who tout a litany of statistics and factoids, which range from flat-Earth science to perfectly valid concerns.
To address the argumentative skeptic, New Scientist published a special report, Climate change: A guide for the perplexed. The report, arranged into 26 sections dealing with popular climate science myths, is on the whole well researched and well written. I would recommend it to anyone interested in the climate debate, regardless of your opinion on the subject. However, among my favorite bones of contention, I ran across this in the page on modeling:

Finally, the claim is sometimes made that if computer models were any good, people would be using them to predict the stock market. Well, they are!
A lot of trading in the financial markets is already carried out by computers. Many base their decisions on fairly simple algorithms designed to exploit tiny profit margins, but others rely on more sophisticated long-term models.
Major financial institutions are investing huge amounts in automated trading systems, the proportion of trading carried out by computers is growing rapidly and some individuals have made a fortune from them. The smart money is being bet on computer models.

This statement is misleading. While government and industry do use increasingly robust computational tools to model markets and economies, New Scientist fails to make that connection. Electronic trading systems are not analogous to climate models, rather they process transactions in a similar fashion to the checkout system at an online retailer. Simple algorithms that make trades based upon small price fluctuations are also cool, but they do not attempt to model or predict anything, any more than a mousetrap predicts the number and frequency of mice attracted to bait. This evasive language on the subject of models may lead readers to question the veracity of other statements made throughout the site.
Part of the problem lies in the fact that many people don’t understand how professional science works. Many recall having solved for velocity in high school physics, or followed that epic poem that ends in "to make ATP" in college biology. At the professional level science does not fit neatly into half-page problems and essay questions, and requires judgment, years of hard work, and collaboration to reach meaningful conclusions. Many confuse debate over technique or corollary details as an attack on broad conclusions.
The contention of so many fields of science that humans are changing the global climate is a grave concern. The general public only now seems to be waking up to what scientists have been cautioning for years. And, as with any contentious debate in the United States, there are many who are digging their heels in because their party or their community leaders say so.
In a culture that lives on opposing dogmas and often struggles with developments in science, we can’t afford to confuse matters. As we work toward parlaying a hard-won mass-realization into changes in mindset and behavior, we must be honest.

Kyoto?

W described climate change as a “serious challenge” in his State of the Union speech last week. What he actually means by that and what he aims to do to address this challenge remain to be seen.
The UN environmental agencies are drawing to a close a major study on global climate change. The news wires report that the study is expected to predict a 3.0 C (5.4 F) warming of average annual temperatures between now and 2100. This report is to further attribute this warming, with some 90 percent certainty, to the activities of humans.
While far from perfect, the adoption of the Kyoto Protocol by much of the industrialized world has enjoyed some success in putting the brakes on what the best science in the world believes to be the cause of this problem.
The US government has sat idly by while many of our friends and allies have worked to reverse this problem. The excuse given by the Bush administration was that adopting the Kyoto Protocol would cost Americans jobs. I have to ask, how many American jobs does the purchase of foreign oil create? How would cultivating a domestic biofuels industry be bad for the economy?
Given the speed of government and the fact that Kyoto runs-out in 2012, it may be Kyoto’s successor that turns on the heat under the US. In conjunction with the UN’s new report on global climate, there is a redoubled effort to hold a new summit on climate. UN scientists are lobbying Secretary General Ban to hold such a summit in September. Given planned discussion of warming-related concerns like the flooding of coastal cities, perhaps the Bush administration will suggest New Orleans as a venue. Perhaps not.
Can we wait for the government to stop talking and start acting? The US and its neighbors to the north and south have enormous agricultural resources. We have the potential to move toward energy independence by producing ethanol and biodiesel for transportation, but the entrepreneur, not the bureaucrat, must realize this change.
American industry has been stymied by a government of the oil, by the oil, and for the oil. Perhaps if we stopped creating an infrastructure so lopsided in favor of petroleum, other sources of energy could compete in a free market. McDonald’s could start marketing McDiesel, made from all of that used fry oil, and Mr. Daniel could start selling Old No. 7 high-performance fuel for hogs. Or is that “hawgz”?
We need more consumer demand and new policies that don’t hand so much to oil companies.