Dear Bull Winkus and WeatherCat climate observers,
I know it must sound clich? by now, but it all comes from global warming.
Not to disagree exactly but to throw in what I think is a very appropriate word of caution. The first computer simulations predicting the effects of global warming date from the early 1990s. There has been a lot of effort invested in trying to understand what CO
2 emissions are doing to the global climate. Yet, nobody seems able to make accurate long-term climate forecasts. Even more troubling, it is clear that the short term forecast models are not longer as accurate or consistent as they once were. If climate change were purely and simply a result of human-caused greenhouse gases, we would expect to be able to predict in advance phenomena like the current drought in California. That is
not happening. As late as November of 2013, the National Weather Service's Climate Prediction Center was predicting a normal rainfall year for California.
There is an inconvenient truth to toss back at Al Gore. For the vast majority of earth's history, the climate has been much more varied and extreme than the past 10,000 or so years in which human civilization flourished. So contrary to our expectations, the climate we have experienced during all that time was -
paradoxically - an anomaly. While humans clearly have benefited from it, past earth climatic history is clear: there is simply no reason to expect it to continue - global warming or not.
That unfortunately throws a particularly difficult monkey wrench into the hopes that simply reducing greenhouse gases with restore the "balance." The physics behind the effects of greenhouse gases is clear and unassailable. The trouble is that we have no clear understandings of the circumstances that have lead to the mild climate anomaly that has permitted human civilization to thrive.
The upshot is that the effects of human activity could have already destabilized climatic conditions such that they cannot return to their former benign conditions. Since the past conditions in which humans had thrived was an anomaly: what guarantee do we have that reducing greenhouse gases will restore a climatic condition, that statistically speaking, should not have persisted in the first place?
What is point of view suggests is that we are gambling with the idea that reducing greenhouse gases can reverse the destabilizing of what once was a benign climatic situation. The alternative point of view is to resign ourselves to a future period of more extreme climatic variations and prepare for it. Given that we live in a time of limited economical resources, we are being forced to choose between one of these two strategies and clearly there is a political preference for the more fairy-tale outlook that we can undo the damage humans have done. What if we can't?
Obviously the fate of millions, perhaps billions, could rest on using our resources wisely to confront the mostly likely outcome of climate change.
Definitely not a happy thought . . . .
Edouard
