It's just common sense, after all

from the Lakeland Times

Will cooler heads finally prevail in global warming debate?


It's an old cliché but one I actually believe, especially when it comes to politics and science, namely, that the truth almost always lives somewhere in the middle, not on the extremes.

Extremists tend to oversimplify. They see patterns and conspiracies where none exist. At the same time they are unable to see the very real and dynamic relationships, both human and nonhuman, that shape each other constantly and eternally, each changing the other over and over again.

Extremists cannot even begin to imagine the inevitably dialectic ebbing and flowing of life that actually defines the world in which we live.

Nowhere is this truer than in the debate about climate change. For the past 50 years, if not more, the extremes have dominated, and, for all that time, in one form or another, the extremists have told us doom is just around the corner.

The end is near, they have blared for so long. That's what the eminent astronomer Carl Sagan told us in 1990 when he predicted an ecological and agricultural catastrophe within the decade because of global warming.

Then, too, fifteen years ago, hysterics began to predict how soon New York and the eastern United States, not to mention other places around the world, would disappear beneath the rising, boiling sea.

Well, the truth is, recent analyses of sea levels over the past century show no trend: sea levels go up and sea levels go down, even for the supposedly ill-fated Tuvalu Islands. Those islands, which are supposed to vanish soon, according to global warming alarmists, are still very much there, and there is a tide gauge record from 1978 to 2008 showing no trend and no overall rise.

Oh, and what about the melting of the polar ice caps? Well the ice is doing quite nice, thank you.

Yes, the extent of Arctic sea ice is somewhat lower than the average extent for the years 1979-2000, but well within striking distance. Meanwhile, sea ice in Antarctica has grown by nearly 10 percent over the past 20 years. I guess global warming forgot that part of the globe.

Of course, the spotlight hasn't always belonged to the global warming fearmongers. Just a few decades ago, scientific consensus had it that we were all going to freeze like popsicles because of - ah - global cooling

"There is very important climactic change (Global Cooling) going on right now, and it's not merely something of academic interest," screamed Fortune magazine in 1974. "It is something that, if it continues, will affect the whole human occupation of the earth - like a billion people starving. The effects are already showing up in a rather drastic way."

Hmmm, back then, the scientific consensus was just the opposite and supposedly just as infallible: "After a week of discussions on the causes of climate change, an assembly of specialists from several continents seems to have reached unanimous agreement on only one point: it is getting colder," yelled the New York Times in 1961.
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And that, followed the Los Angeles Times in 1962, meant sure disaster: "Like an outrigger canoe riding before a huge comber, the earth with its inhabitants is caught on the downslope of an immense climactic wave that is plunging us toward another Ice Age."

Wow. I'll be right back; I have to go get another jacket.

So in less than 50 years, the scientific consensus has shifted fiercely from one extreme to another, from global cooling to global warming, but whichever one you picked, by gosh, you had to act then and now, no matter how radical the proposal, no matter the economic consequences.

Now, this year finally, comes some refreshing news, and from right here in Wisconsin. In January, two mathematical scientists at the UW-Milwaukee reported a cyclical, natural shift in the climate, a combination of natural events, the intersection of which has stalled the most recent period of global warming.

In fact, say mathematicians Kyle L. Swanson and Anastasios Tsonis, mean global temperatures haven't risen since 2001 and likely will remain stable or even drop over the next decade or perhaps longer.

In their paper, Has the Climate Recently Shifted?, the scientists observe that the trend in global mean temperatures has gone up and down over the past century or so, but each trend has lasted a significant period of time, and the trend in mean temperatures has been flat since 2001.

"If as suggested here, a dynamically driven climate shift has occurred, the duration of similar shifts during the 20th century suggests the new global mean temperature trend may persist for several decades," the scientists write. " . . . the nature of these past shifts in climate state suggests, the possibility of near constant temperature lasting a decade or more into the future must at least be entertained."

Of course, the ink wasn't even dry on the paper before extremists grabbed their work and misinterpreted it - using it as Internet fodder to debunk the existence of any global warming.

That's not what the scientists are saying. In fact, they are saying just the opposite, namely, that this period of cooling or flatness is occurring in spite of processes that cause global warming.

"Moreover, we caution that the shifts described here are presumably superimposed upon a long term warming trend due to anthropogenic forcing," Swanson and Tsonis write.

Due to global warming, in other words, which suggests that over the very long term, unless we cut carbon dioxide emissions, overall temperatures are likely to keep on going up.

There are two valuable lessons to be learned from all this. One, we must understand that we don't understand.

To be sure, what we have learned is that today's scientific consensus is little more than shifting quicksand within which panic ensnares us as we quickly sink beneath the suffocating, choking inevitability of its so-called indisputable facts.

But facts are disputable, and Swanson and Tsonis know it: "The apparent lack of proximate cause behind the halt in warming post 2001/02 challenges our understanding of the climate system ... ."

So let's stop pretending that doomsday scientists and their extremist political followers and Al Gore know it all. It turns out that Mr. Gore's inconvenient truth is that we are all too inconveniently ignorant for him to be so arrogant and smug.

How to proceed then? I think we should listen to prudent people like Swanson and Tsonis.

"To me, we are throwing all of this carbon dioxide into the air - it does have some effect," Tsonis told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. "Common sense tells me that."

Thank you, Mr. Tsonis.

Doomsday tomorrow because of global warming? Nah, don't think so. But, no global warming and no harmful effects at all? I wouldn't count on that, either.

Common sense tells us the truth is in the middle, and so should be our environmental policies.

Yes, we need to cut carbon dioxide emissions, but we have the time to do so sensibly and without unfairly burdening business or bankrupting the American economy even more so than it already is.

Just yesterday, Democrats unveiled a new proposal to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 83 percent by 2050, a timetable even more aggressive than that proposed by President Obama.

Laudable, but is it realistic? Is it affordable? Healthy debate is needed, and it shouldn't be driven by Chicken Little nonsense. For one thing, at the heart of the scheme is a cap-and-trade policy that caps overall pollution but allows individual firms to buy and trade pollution credits - in others words, credits giving them the right to pollute.


But to buy the credits will cost trillions of dollars across the economy, and who is going to pay for that? We are, when the companies buying the credits pass the costs along to us.

So we'd better think long and hard about the path we take. Reducing greenhouse emissions is a sensible goal; it deserves a sensible strategy to make it happen, not one dreamed up in the afterheat of a steamy election.
When it comes to debating global warming, everybody should just take a page from good old planet Earth these days and cool down a bit. Enjoy the chilly middle instead of the heated extremes.

It's just common sense, after all