EQUIVOCATING ABOUT WHAT'S 'UNEQUIVOCAL'
When it comes to predictions about the possible course of climate change, there are some questions that demand research, not hysteria, in order to establish and distinguish causes from effects.
The environment reporter with The Globe and Mail newspaper in Toronto, Canada is Martin Mittelstaedt. He reports regularly on the "climate change" file and has followed the international discourse on this topic since at least the time of the Rio Earth Summit of 1992, which set the stage for drafting the Kyoto GHG targets announced in 1995. In a front-page article in the 31 January 2007 editions of the paper, he has published an article entitled The fallout of global warming: 1,000 years. The subhead of the article declares: "In stark terms, scientists confirm that climate change is 'unequivocal'". This article recycles themes that have become commonplaces of the entire discussion, notions that many now take for granted. This commentary asks some questions about some of these themes.
First: what evidence provides the basis for the assertion at the very beginning of this article that "humans have already caused so much damage to the atmosphere that the effects of global warming will last for more than 1,000 years"? Yes, there is clear evidence that global climate is undergoing changes. Yes, many of these appear unprecedented according to the timescales over which natural events are observed and studied to which humans are also witness. Yes, human activities are contributing greenhouse-gas effects that would otherwise not be present.
However, beyond these three affirmations, the following has yet to be established: are these contributions triggering global universal effects, or effects at multiple point-sources that also happen to be distributed globally? Are there no other sources of universal effects? Even more fundamentally: are there climate-altering processes that operate across geological-type timescales that have not yet been investigated in this regard?
The selection of timescale is dependent on a geological record, e.g., core samples. This record is known to be incomplete, i.e., to include gaps great and small. At least some of these gaps are themselves believed to mark, or likely to mark, major climate-changing events such as meteorite strikes. Hence, the geological record taken as a whole incorporates non-linear transformations.
An outstanding feature of a non-linear transformation is that any trace of what the world and its climate looked like before the point of transformation has been erased in, and by, the transformation itself. Only in a linear transformation, and even then only with certain special kinds, can we continue to view the state of a system before the point of transformation as well as after. In the natural environment, however, transformations of a linear kind, if detectable at all, are detectable only within selected finite bounds of time and space. At broader scales, going further out to include a vaster range of time and space, these linear transformations are overtaken by non-linear transformations whose prehistory can no longer be recovered by extrapolating backwards in time.
What if ="climate change" is in fact a collection of effects seen at multiple point-sources that also happen to be distributed globally? Then, what is most likely is that the natural environmental system must adjust to a new "normal" equilibrium whose duration cannot be predicted in advance. What seems most unlikely under such a scenario is that the human-induced effects and contributions have overwhelmed nature's capacity to compensate.
Here, however, one must choose. If the scenario of human contributions triggering global universal effects is true, then the scenario of effects at multiple point-sources that also happen to be distributed globally must be ruled out. If the scenario of effects at multiple point-sources that also happen to be distributed globally is true, then the scenario of human contributions triggering global universal effects must be ruled out. Either way, until this is settled, the rest of the discourse about climate change cannot achieve coherence. To proceed otherwise is to promulgate disinformation. Without researching and establishing the science of all the various ways in which climate actually has changed, all modelling of climate change, global warming etc., will and must remain aphenomenal.
The Mittelstaedt article appears at a moment in which it is being suggested quite widely that big industry has ceased resisting the climate change bandwagon and is now joining it. Yes: many industrial leaders have indeed ceased bashing what it used to deride as the environmentalist lobby's "rhetoric", to embrace what is now called the "weight of the evidence". However, as mentioned above, this "evidence" is seriously flawed by a lack of coherence on a fundamental point. Turning to the matter of its "weight", i.e., its credibility, a cautionary tale comes to mind.
From about 300 BCE until about 1650 CE, almost two millennia, the world of European scientific knowledge was quite certain that the speed at which any object fell to earth depended on its weight. Ergo: heavier objects must fall towards the earth faster than lighter objects. Gravity existed before humans and human consciousness of it, but no one associated this personally perceived phenomenon of gravity with a physically approximately constant rate at which all objects are bound to accelerate towards the earth anywhere on its surface. That connection was established only by the persistence of Galileo and the work of Newton. Once established, this connection demonstrated the falsity of thinking that heavier objects must fall towards the earth faster than lighter objects. Except for Galileo and Newton, however, we could all still be operating according to the notion that heavier objects must fall towards the earth faster than lighter objects. Here is the problem. One cannot believe both things to be true. To accept that both can coexist as equally true, or as parts of the same larger truth, requires embracing an incoherence in the foundations of our knowledge.
What is the situation we now face regarding the discourse about climate change? A big struggle has been waged for the last 40 years over the role and contribution of human agency in transforming and degrading the physical natural environment. That was the context in which the consequences of human activity for climate began to be raised. This turned into a struggle over "whether" and to what extent human activity was responsible for climate change. To escape what had become a seemingly "sterile" standoff between industry and environmentalists, the ground of the argument shifted. Now it was argued: it doesn't matter who's responsible, the climate is changing irrevocably because of an accumulation of bad things done in the past by industry and other forms of human agency. So, now, all resources and efforts should become invested in stopping this new juggernaut.
We live in a world with an economy dominated by monopolies. Monopolies assert rights ahead of the peoples to the lands, air, waters etc. These monopolies' newly discovered urgency to save the environment regardless of who is responsible for wrecking it is the latest form in which monopoly right has cloaked itself. Monopoly right can indeed prevail on this front if and only if scientists, and scientifically knowledgeable and educated members of the public, fail to stand up and ask: what's the basis for assuming climate change is unidirectional and irreversible, when nothing else in nature is?
The Mittelstaedt article mentions a consensus of more than 2000 scientists that climate change is unidirectional and irreversible; however, this establishes nothing more than the fact that 2000 people agree about something. Also mentioned is an unbroken record of climatological data going back to the 1850s, i.e., less than 160 years. This also establishes nothing, however, about the dynamics of an atmosphere that is billions of years old. Just as indecisive on this question of overall dynamics is the evidence the article mentions of core samples indicating something unprecedented about methane and carbon-dioxide levels in the last 650 000 of those billions of years. Amidst the "weight" of all this "evidence", it's easy to forget that, for almost two thousand years, knowledgeable people in Europe watched heavier objects fall faster to the ground than lighter objects. But we shouldn't. The stakes are too high -- not only in the meteorological sense, but especially in the social, political and economic atmosphere of global cartels striving to entrench monopoly right.
