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 For at least the next decade, the most august scientific authorities
are now saying, global average temperatures will not increase. My first
instinct, had I any free money to blow, is to bet that they will rise:
less from a betting impulse than from greed, for I've noticed that a
lot of money has been made betting against the consensus of the
authorities in my lifetime, and a lot lost on assuming it was sound.
I
might hesitate, however, in this instance, for from the little I know
about world climate -- enough to dismiss global warming alarmists, but
not enough to make my own confident predictions -- a cooling trend is
more likely than a warming one, in the near future, for two big
reasons. First, Earth weather seems to track space weather, and the
solar magnetic activity cycle seems to be entering relaxation mode.
Second,
we have, as everybody agrees, regardless of their views on greenhouse
warming, just passed through a decades-long phase of slightly rising
global temperatures, which followed a few decades of slightly falling
temperatures. The rise ended about 1998, a record warm year. We're at
the top of the roller coaster now. Experience should tell us: hang on
for the plunge.
Another analogy might be to trends in breathing. It would not follow
that my reader will never inhale again, from the fact that he is
exhaling now.
The news, for what it's worth, comes from the
Leibniz Institute of Marine Sciences, in Kiel, Germany, prominently
played in the international science journal Nature. The authors of the
study applied existing knowledge of oscillations in ocean temperatures,
especially in the North Atlantic, to computer models of the
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that show consistent upward
trends. This had not been done before, and when it was, the IPCC's
predicted 0.3°C rise in global atmospheric temperatures over the next
decade was cancelled out.
Cautions within cautions: the Leibniz
Institute is also dealing in computer models, which, in their nature,
cannot even reliably predict the weather in Ottawa next weekend. Close
readers of the news would discover that IPCC's "grand central" model
did not even consider such major known climatological factors as Gulf
Stream pressures and the El Niño cycle.
In turn, the Leibniz
Institute's modelling necessarily focuses on the North Atlantic,
because that's what we have information on. Vast tracts of the Pacific,
Indian and southern oceans have not yet been seeded with networks of
instrumental buoys, and most of these read only the surface. For all
practical purposes, the influence on climate of seas covering well over
half the world's surface are "mare incognita."
Conversely,
information about human contributions to the world's climate is only
too plentiful, thanks to the global craze for gathering economic
statistics. We have every reason to believe it is quite small, yet the
mere availability of mountains of data about it confers a systemic bias
on any computer modelling, as on any other kind of statistical
analysis. You go with the numbers you have, and draw very big
conclusions from very narrow assumptions.
This is a routine flaw in all modern scientific thinking, which
scientists themselves are loath to consider, just as we all are loath
to consider facts of life that must tend to make us very, very humble.
To be charitable to the scientists who take the pay of the IPCC --
though only for the briefest moment -- myopia is a universal human
condition. We all imagine that what we know is intrinsically more
significant than what we don't yet know, or even cannot know.
This
is why the empirical outlook of science needs balancing against the
philosophical outlook, which demands context, and seeks breadth. It is
incidentally also why the greater advances in scientific understanding
are often made by rank amateurs -- people like Einstein working in
places like Swiss patent offices, who can see the forest in spite of
all the trees.
It is also why such a disproportionate number of
the greatest theoretical advances have been made by religious "nutjobs"
(in the current parlance) -- from the evangelical Newton, to the
Catholic fundamentalist Galileo, to monks such as Copernicus, Mendel
and Lemaître -- people chilled out by disposition, with a grand view of
nature and her infinitely distant, but transubstantially present, God.
Without such vision, we all tend to become easily panicked data
crunchers.
I was struck this week by another science story, also in Nature
magazine. The techies at Hewlett-Packard have successfully fabricated
"memristors," a fourth building block for electronic circuits (after
capacitors, resistors, and inductors). The achievement promises
significant advances in computer memory and processing.
The
possibility of memristors was first established by Leon Chua, a
professor at Berkeley, in 1971. He said this week, "I'm thrilled
because it's almost like vindication. Something I did is not just in my
imagination, it's fundamental."
I love the implicit faith and
humility in that statement. The man is thrilled because he didn't
really invent anything after all, merely discovered ("dis-covered")
something already there, in nature or "the mind of God."
And that is where authority comes from. Not from "scientists." Source
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