The policy statement on climate change recently issued by the American Geophysical Union (E-Daily, Feb. 2) is a trifecta of error. It is inappropriate, unfortunate and incorrect.
Inappropriate because an organization whose mission is to publish first class journals has no business taking a policy position on this issue. Given that anyone with 20 bucks - seven bucks for students - can join the AGU, statements beginning "The AGU believes" or "AGU recommends" make no sense. If the six people on the panel that drafted the AGU statement, or the 26 who approved it, want to form the Union of Concerned Geophysical Scientists and enter the policy lists, they are welcome to do so. For the AGU to do so is a disservice to its members and a sham.
The unfortunate thing is that this fiasco feeds the climate change scare mongers' number one argument -- that "most scientists believe in human induced climate change." The latter claim is of course meaningless, since there is no such thing as most scientists, the concept "scientist" being too vague to be countable. Moreover, the truth is that the scientific literature is as aflame with debate as the policy arena, except the scientists are much more polite about it. (When I was a practicing scientist -- if logic is a science -- it took me a while to learn that when my colleague said he didn't quite understand what I meant, he meant I was full of crap.) As a climate change skeptic, I collect science that supports skepticism, and there is no lack of it.
Even worse, the only two important statements in the AGU's hopelessly convoluted manifesto are false. The first false claim is that human-induced climate change is known to exist. The second false claim is that the scientific uncertainties do not justify inaction. This is not a statement IN geophysical science, but a statement ABOUT that science, a statement about uncertainty and action. If there is a science of such things it is logic -- my science. As a logician of science, who has studied the climate change literature, I am certain that the uncertainties justify inaction.
Speaking about the science, perhaps the worst thing about the AGU statement is that it masks a terribly important truth, to wit: The climate change science is beyond human comprehension. Thanks to a global research budget of several billion dollars a year, the outpouring of findings is so vast that no one can possible read even a large fraction of it. The AGU's own Journal of Geophysical Research runs to tens of thousands of pages a year, and there are lots of other journals. The AGU panelists claim to have conducted a "review of the science," but that is impossible
Science is funny stuff. A single finding, perhaps overlooked by the big shots, is enough to wreck a theory. My personal favorite is a brief piece that appeared in the JGR in 1993. It shows that a simple, one-dimensional, but nonlinear (that's the key point), model of ocean up-welling was enough to explain the supposed temperature oscillation of the last century. The ocean has 300 times the mass of the atmosphere, and a very different temperature. Add to that the fact that accurate ocean-atmosphere modeling is computationally impossible at present and you have a world of uncertainty. Read the lips of the logic: the uncertainties justify inaction.
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