Re: For those who don't read the New Scientist: GLOBAL WARMING HIDDEN BYSMOKE SCREEN

[Hugh Haskell <hhaskell@MINDSPRING.COM>]

At 15:06 -0400 6/16/03, Bob LaMontagne wrote:
> ???? Global Warming seems to one of the few theories where the failure to
> get the predicted result is heralded as proof of the theory. Volcanoes, "El
> Nino", now smoke from burning jungles -  what is the next "proof"?
That certainly isn't the way I read the article. I don't think any
responsible scientist has ever claimed "proof" of the existence or
non-existence of greenhouse global warming. "Proofs" are for
mathematicians and perhaps lawyers, not for scientists. All we have
to go on is the weight of the evidence. If we build a model of, say,
the atmosphere, and then, based on the model, we make some
predictions about the future, which prove to be less accurate that we
think they should have been, then we have two options: scrap the
model, or try to find out what is not good enough about the model.
Saying, "Well, obviously we were wrong about our predictions," and
going back to the status quo ante is not a realistic option. That is
the equivalent of assuming that what was good enough yesterday will
be good enough tomorrow, a policy that has gotten us into trouble
before, and could easily, big time, again (and as an example of this,
I submit what is happening to the world's fisheries).

It seems to me that the evidence for a general warming of the earth
is pretty clear. The only question is why it is happening. If this is
a part of one of the general warming-cooling cycles that have
occurred over the millennia, then one set of actions may be called
for. If it is due to our actions--mostly industrialization--then
quite another set of actions is necessary. Both will likely be quite
expensive, but may well be mutually exclusive, either in
effectiveness or in our economic ability to take on both actions. We
need the best information we can get to choose which course of action
to take, and the best way is to keep improving our models, so that
their predictions agree with reality to the best extent possible.
Only in that way can we determine what is going on and what to do
about it, if anything.

There is plenty of evidence that particulate matter in the atmosphere
shields the surface from some of the direct solar radiation. It
doesn't seem unreasonable to me that increasing particulate emissions
at the same time as we increase CO_2 emissions can have effects which
to some extent counterbalance each other at the earth's surface. So
bringing that up at this point doesn't seem to be the sort of thing
you are decrying, but simply an effort to improve the atmospheric
model, and to guess at what the effect of this improvement may be on
the issue of global climate change.

A global average temperature is a concept that is hard to get your
hands around, given the wide variation in temperatures on the earth
both as a function of location and of time, and discovering changes
of the magnitude reported clearly represent digging pretty deep into
the noise to tease out the signal, but that isn't impossible, and
there are some widely respected recent experiments that did just that
to detect even tinier signals, The discovery of distant planetary
systems and of the recent variation in the cosmic background
temperature springs to mind, as does the anticipated sensitivity of
the LIGO gravity wave apparatus. So, I think it is not wise to
dismiss out of hand the results reported so far, just because they
are not of "2x4-between-the-eyes" clarity. By the time we get
incontrovertible data, it may be too late to do anything to avoid the
consequences, to our great detriment.

Hugh
--

Hugh Haskell
<mailto:haskell@ncssm.edu>
<mailto:hhaskell@mindspring.com>

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