Science is a method, one well suited to finding the connections between seeming disparate phenomena. Electricity flow along a wire, a magnetic field flows outward from it, and yet these two phenomena are two sides of a single interaction. Insects foraging food on a jungle carpet, fish foraging food on the sea floor, and yet evolution gives us a predictive framework that points us back to a common ancestor, billions of years old. Science can often take no single phenomenon as a critical piece of evidence, but placed together the pattern emerges. The nodes of a spiderweb tell us nothing of its function, the silk teaches us little about its function. Only by tracing the silk. following the nodes, do we see the web emerge.
Today, when I read the “gross mischaracterization of what science tells us about extreme weather and global climate change”:http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20051130/ap_on_re_ca/canada_climate_change;_ylt=AvkGG_5icqKJJ9NMm7EBGVis0NUE;_ylu=X3oDMTA3b3JuZGZhBHNlYwM3MjE-, I was therefore *appalled*. This abuse of science’s conclusions came not from a Turkish reporter, not from a Discovery Institute fellow, and not from a schoolboard member in Kansas. It came from the top US environmental negotiator for environmental issues. Let’s consider the statement: that scientists can’t point to a single phenomenon and definitively pronounce it the sneeze or cough of global warming. By that reasoning, he seems to suggest science can’t conclude anything about the verity for global climate change, and swift action on the part of governments is thus not called for.
While the strength of a single hurricane is not acutely sensitive to climate change, the aggregate of all storms will on average be up to 10% stronger, according to several climate models. While the melting of a single ice shelf in Antarctica can’t be blamed on climate change, the fact that polar ice and glaciers across all continents are receding points a finger. While the CO2 emissions from a single industry cannot be correlated with global temperature, the average of all emissions across a century is strongly correlated. While this year is no more choked by CO2 than a decade ago, its contained CO2 levels unmatched for thousands of year.
Science has revealed a persuasive pattern: greenhouse gas levels rising, carbon sinks depleted, temperatures rising, weather changing. No single phenomenon is necessarily worrying, but taken together the pattern is alarming. To deny the pattern in favor of the pieces is reckless on the part of our negotiator, and at minimum points to a gross misunderstanding of science.
More info: the negotiator is Harlan Watson; the quote was,
“There’s a difference between climate and extreme weather,” Watson said. “Our scientists continually tell us we cannot blame any single extreme event, attribute that to climate change.”
