Global warming?

[Undertoad]

A return to thread topic

The usual prologue: I believe in global warming, I understand the theory of greenhouse gas and why it's plausible man has had a factor in this increase.

However, as a born skeptic, I have to apply that too, and the debate fascinates me. Let's test these ideas with the right kinds of questions, and as the questions are answered correctly, so the truth becomes evident. Or doesn't!

The most interesting skeptical question has become more and more prominent as time has gone by: Why hasn't there been any additional global warming since 1998? Why haven't climate scientists' models proven out?

One very emotionally unsatisfying idea now comes along: because of Chinese pollution.

(Reuters) - Smoke belching from Asia's rapidly growing economies is largely responsible for a halt in global warming in the decade after 1998 because of sulphur's cooling effect, even though greenhouse gas emissions soared, a U.S. study said on Monday.

The paper raised the prospect of more rapid, pent-up climate change when emerging economies eventually crack down on pollution.

World temperatures did not rise from 1998 to 2008, while manmade emissions of carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuel grew by nearly a third, various data show.

The researchers from Boston and Harvard Universities and Finland's University of Turku said pollution, and specifically sulphur emissions, from coal-fueled growth in Asia was responsible for the cooling effect.

Sulphur allows water drops or aerosols to form, creating hazy clouds which reflect sunlight back into space.

"Anthropogenic activities that warm and cool the planet largely cancel after 1998, which allows natural variables to play a more significant role," the paper said.

This all just adds such a new layer of complexity over it all that the debate starts to be overwhelming.

It does raise many more questions, and now the whole notion of scientific consensus starts to weaken, because there is probably no consensus on the current observations. Climate science did not predict this. The models did not include all the necessary information.

At this point, one takeaway for me is that it's really amazingly hard to predict the future. It's one of our deepest desires, to know the future, to know the likely outcomes and to determine the greatest dangers. But it's also amazingly difficult to do.

Economics was a finer science when economists weren't goaded into predicting the future. Everything is so connected that any one science cannot see the broader picture. A new finding changes everything; just like a new invention changes everything, or a new idea changes everything. And all these things are so interconnected that even saying what happen next year, we could be quite wrong.