More Heat Than Light

The chairman of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Rajendra Pachauri, has allegedly said that global warming skeptics should rub their faces with asbestos every morning.  I gather Mr. Pachauri is not fond of global warming skeptics.

Earlier this week I received yet another e-mail expressing an opinion about global warming.  This one assumed that it was all nonsense, and had some personality "explain" why it wasn't happening.

These two items, though expressing opposing views, have something in common.  They are both heavy on opinion but light on facts.  Most of the discussions about global warming are like that.  They generate more heat than light.

Part of the problem is that we simply don't have enough facts to make a reasonable decision about global warming.

• We don't know that global warming would be the world-wide catastrophe some have predicted.
  
• We don't know that there is a thing we can do to stop global warming.
  
• We don't know whether global warming is man-made or natural.
  
• We don't even know whether there is any global warming to begin with.

None of these questions has been answered satisfactorily.  Before you start howling that it's "obvious" that global warming [is | isn't ] happening, or that it's man-made, or that we can stop it, or that it's even bad - before you jump on me about this, ask yourself how you know the truth about global warming.  What information do you have that settles these questions, that conclusively proves it [is | isn't ] an issue?  If you really have such information, I encourage you to share it with climate scientists, since they don't have it yet.

Certain temperature readings suggest that there may be a warming trend in our climate.  If this trend exists, some researchers think it may be related to human activity.  If that's the case, then some scientist believe that humans will be able to reverse or at least slow down the rate of warming.  And if that's the case, some believe we should do it, because the effects of warming would be disastrous.  That's a lot of if's.  If some of them don't turn out to be true, then much of what we think about global warming will be affected, and possibly completely invalidated.

We can argue endlessly, but this won't help us.  We need to gather more information before we have any hope of making an informed decision.