Warm Feelings in Cold Times
This morning, after crawling into work along ice-choked freeways, I arrived at my desk to hear a coworker mention a news article claiming our frigid weather was yet another sign of Global Warming. I didn't ask for the link. The sad thing is, he unreservedly bought the claim, and judging by the bobble-headed nods of a few others in the area he was far from alone.
We've come to a sad state in public knowledge when people can read an ever-going series of incredible claims contrary to their own experience without reserving at least a bit of skepticism.
The original claim was, as I recall, that Global Warming was going to make everything warmer, with forecasts of droughts and heatwaves and rising oceans. That thread hasn't entirely died, as every such local event every summer inevitably is linked to Global Warming. As much as it might annoy anyone who realizes local heat waves tell you precisely nothing about global trends, it's pretty easy to understand in the popular imagination. Heat is hot, after all. And if you're hot this Global Warming stuff seems a lot more real.
But then came the problem... this "escalating warming" sure was taking a long time to get here. Record heat can only be hyped by appealing to individual anecdotes so long as enough people are actually experiencing something close enough themselves to pay attention. The only way to keep the Global Warming bandwagon rolling through the public mind was to try a new angle in response to increasing cool weather phenomena. Sure enough, we started hearing stories about how Global Warming could also account for cooling. The details of such cooling claims ranged from the spectacular (it would alter the Atlantic tides, resulting in a new Ice Age) to the mundane (local cold weather does nothing to disturb the long term warming trends - true 'dat, but curiously not as relevant to reporters when that local weather is warm).
In the blink of an eye Global Warming had now become unfalsifiable in the public imagination. Feeling warmer? That's Global Warming. Feeling colder? That's also Global Warming. Drought? Global Warming. Flood? Global Warming.
Even lack of catastrophe is no longer reason to put off panicking. When I read the latest science journalistic spin on any sort of cooling evidence, I'm reminded of the old movie cliche... "Sure it's quiet... too quiet!"
It would be nice (though I don't expect it) for some servant of the public interest to collect some of these panicky predictions and worst case scenarios in a way that allows them to be measured over time. Obviously the Associated Press isn't going to be performing that task, as if that's a surprise.
Barring that, I'd like the legal right to bonk people on the head the next time they try to link the weather they just experienced to Global anything.
We've come to a sad state in public knowledge when people can read an ever-going series of incredible claims contrary to their own experience without reserving at least a bit of skepticism.
The original claim was, as I recall, that Global Warming was going to make everything warmer, with forecasts of droughts and heatwaves and rising oceans. That thread hasn't entirely died, as every such local event every summer inevitably is linked to Global Warming. As much as it might annoy anyone who realizes local heat waves tell you precisely nothing about global trends, it's pretty easy to understand in the popular imagination. Heat is hot, after all. And if you're hot this Global Warming stuff seems a lot more real.
But then came the problem... this "escalating warming" sure was taking a long time to get here. Record heat can only be hyped by appealing to individual anecdotes so long as enough people are actually experiencing something close enough themselves to pay attention. The only way to keep the Global Warming bandwagon rolling through the public mind was to try a new angle in response to increasing cool weather phenomena. Sure enough, we started hearing stories about how Global Warming could also account for cooling. The details of such cooling claims ranged from the spectacular (it would alter the Atlantic tides, resulting in a new Ice Age) to the mundane (local cold weather does nothing to disturb the long term warming trends - true 'dat, but curiously not as relevant to reporters when that local weather is warm).
In the blink of an eye Global Warming had now become unfalsifiable in the public imagination. Feeling warmer? That's Global Warming. Feeling colder? That's also Global Warming. Drought? Global Warming. Flood? Global Warming.
Even lack of catastrophe is no longer reason to put off panicking. When I read the latest science journalistic spin on any sort of cooling evidence, I'm reminded of the old movie cliche... "Sure it's quiet... too quiet!"
It would be nice (though I don't expect it) for some servant of the public interest to collect some of these panicky predictions and worst case scenarios in a way that allows them to be measured over time. Obviously the Associated Press isn't going to be performing that task, as if that's a surprise.
Barring that, I'd like the legal right to bonk people on the head the next time they try to link the weather they just experienced to Global anything.
Posted by Doug Williams on
Monday December 15, 2008 at 2:43pm
"Some servant" has done the work. Look up what Senator James Inhofe has done. He now has a list of climate scientists who are skeptics, and it is longer than the list of the IPCC scientists who put out the famous report. He's also got the ev-i-dence.