Bogus Gold

I'm a little puzzled as to why the recent Pravda article predicting an imminent new ice age is getting so much play in supposedly mainstream news sources. My puzzlement has two sources:

1. The mainstream media hasn't seemed much interested in the statements or work of climate scientists who have gone against the prevailing Global Warming mindset in the past.

2. It's Pravda. That's not a journalistic organ one normally takes at face value. I know there's no Soviet Union anymore, but Russia hardly has a tradition of a free press.

It's even more puzzling when you go into the article and discover they're not really talking about anything new. The article merely elaborates on the notion that we're sitting at what is likely the tail end of an inter-glacial period. We don't really know if the next ice age is a few years, a few hundred years, or a few thousand years away. We don't know this because we've never seen the beginning of an ice age before. Scientific knowledge about how to predict ice ages is, to put it kindly, a work in progress. Sure we think we have some idea about it. But until those thoughts allow us to successfully predict something it's merely a best guess.

Think about it this way. If you needed to know something of practical importance to your own life - say, for example, you wanted to know whether or not your investment portfolio was likely to go up in value if you made certain changes - you'd go to someone for advice only if they had some kind of history of making successful predictions about that kind of thing. You might not expect such a person to know with absolute certainty - after all, predicting future events is inherently an uncertain thing to some degree. But you would probably not go to someone with a record of making lots of investment predictions, but who had never been able to check how those predictions turned out. Confidence in this future predicting stuff is bolstered by experience in:

A. Making predictions.

and

B. Verifying results.

When it comes to the ice age prediction business we simply don't have anyone who has ever done the "B" part before. We couldn't have. The time the last ice age began was the era of the Neanderthal, sadly not known for its careful attention to the scientific method and unfortunately wanting in the record keeping department regardless.

I'm not saying it's never valuable or proper for a scientist to make predictions in such a circumstance. Making predictions is one of the things science does, and the subject matter doesn't always allow for easy testing of that prediction. However one needs to distinguish tried and true scientific predictions (things like: if you cut me, I shall bleed) from the untested kind (things like theories about the nature of undiscovered "dark matter" somewhere in the universe). The distinction must be made in an area summed up in one word: confidence. You can't be nearly as confident about the accuracy of an untested scientific prediction as the tested kind.

Clever readers might have caught on that I have this same problem with predictions made about global warming theory. It's very good at making predictions - about floods, droughts, hurricanes, the extent of sea ice, etc. It just doesn't like to wait for the predictions to be proven or disproven by real evidence before we MUST ACT with great certainty.

It's possible the Pravda article is intentionally written to make this very point in a wry way: "Look, we have even MORE evidence - millions of years worth - about a different climate prediction that can't be tested." It's possible, but I doubt it.

More likely it's a signal that crypto-Czar Putin has no intention of joining the G-8 in any carbon reduction plans, and would in fact prefer that the West continues to consume all the fossil fuels his country would like to sell us rather than making any of our own planned reductions. I just didn't realize Putin had the ability to plant such a propaganda piece in the middle of a reputedly professional media.