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Climate change
Jan. 20th, 2010 10:45 amI was in a swanky cocktail bar the other night and over a long mojito I got talking to a girl, like you do. As we chatted we got talking abut the weather, and she brought up climate change and mentioned her green activism. In response, I pointed out the energy usage to make refrigerants for the ice in her drink, the high-gain non-LED lighting at the bar, and the way she kept checking her email on her Blackberry and the fact that the single biggest driver of human energy consumption in the last decade has been online activity. Needless to say this could have been better received and she asked me what I thought about climate change.
"You know what?", I said. "I haven't a clue."
As it turned out, this wasn't the right thing to say either.
Socrates once mentioned that the wise man knows that he knows nothing and, like Bill & Ted, my response to that is "Whoa, that's me". The problem with owning up to not having a clue on climate change is that it leaves one open to being attacked by people on both sides of what is a very polarised debate. Say it on the Guardian's Comment is free section, and you're an evil free-marketeer who just wants to burn all the oil as fast as possible and doesn't love Gaia enough. Say it on the Telegraph Blogs and you're an evil lefty who just wants to seize the opportunity to force through a high-tax, high-social-control regime. As a result I just tend to make jokes about it because really I don't have a clue.
Certainly I accept that it's almost certain that the climate is changing. Expecting a massively complex system to remain static over time is unrealistic and I've no problem with that. However, the causes and effects are so muddy that I struggle to decide anything beyond that. You see, both the man-made climate change and the non-man made climate change sides present pretty much identical data and claim it reinforces their position; take, for example, these two graphs. They represent the Central England Dataset, which is the oldest continuous recording of temperatures in the world and should, you'd think, give a reasonably accurate depiction of what's going on.
Graph One seems to show, pretty unequivocally, a sudden sharp spike in temperatures in the last few dacades which is commensurate with human industrial activity:
As we can see, it's suddenly got a lot warmer since about 1980, which is what man-made climate change would predict.
However, Graph Two presents exactly the same data slightly differently and we get wildly different results:
As we can see, this shows a consistent, slow rise in temperature over 400 years, which is exactly what we would expect as we're still coming out of the medieval Little Ice Age. The problem is that so much data and advice and information is similarly presented by both sides in such mutually contradictory ways that eventually I give up trying to follow it and just say "I don't know". The recent evidence that the International Panel on Climate Change based their position on glacial melting on a single unattributed quote from a 1999 New Scientist article, and that University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit actively witheld negative cases in their research and tried to undermine peer review have only served to intensify my confusion, not make me any more confident in any one position. Similarly Mars is also growing warmer in line with sunspot activity and there's no people there (probably) to be belting out CO2; on the other hand, polar ice caps are shifting so plainly something is going on here.
So what conclusion to draw? And what should one do? Well, I already do all the stuff which gets put in "10 ways to reduce your carbon footprint" articles. I don't drive a car and I use lots of public transport. I turn off lights when I'm not in the room - not because I want to save the world, but because electricity costs money and I'm not going to pay for something I'm not using when I could be using that money for important things like booze and women. Similarly I always turn off the tap rather than running it, but that's because I grew up in a house with a water meter and I learned to do so when I was very young.
I do this stuff not because of the Ice Caps, but just because I'm frugal and waste costs money - I'd rather have my money in my pocket than someone elses.
So, for once, I'm not going to draw any conclusions. I'm not going to say 'Here's what I think and here's what to do about it'*, because I just don't know. Instead I'm going to throw open the floor and ask you lot what you think. Are you left similarly confused by the polarity of debate on whether people are changing the climate? Are people responsible for a changing climate, or is it sunspot activity? Or what?
*Despite that fact that whenever I do so on here I've had a 100% record of being right. Like that time in Feb 2005 when I predicted an economic crash and I got piled on by people telling me how wrong I was and how Gordon Brown was an econonic genius who'd ended boom and bust. Ha! Egg on your faces now, bozos.
"You know what?", I said. "I haven't a clue."
As it turned out, this wasn't the right thing to say either.
Socrates once mentioned that the wise man knows that he knows nothing and, like Bill & Ted, my response to that is "Whoa, that's me". The problem with owning up to not having a clue on climate change is that it leaves one open to being attacked by people on both sides of what is a very polarised debate. Say it on the Guardian's Comment is free section, and you're an evil free-marketeer who just wants to burn all the oil as fast as possible and doesn't love Gaia enough. Say it on the Telegraph Blogs and you're an evil lefty who just wants to seize the opportunity to force through a high-tax, high-social-control regime. As a result I just tend to make jokes about it because really I don't have a clue.
Certainly I accept that it's almost certain that the climate is changing. Expecting a massively complex system to remain static over time is unrealistic and I've no problem with that. However, the causes and effects are so muddy that I struggle to decide anything beyond that. You see, both the man-made climate change and the non-man made climate change sides present pretty much identical data and claim it reinforces their position; take, for example, these two graphs. They represent the Central England Dataset, which is the oldest continuous recording of temperatures in the world and should, you'd think, give a reasonably accurate depiction of what's going on.
Graph One seems to show, pretty unequivocally, a sudden sharp spike in temperatures in the last few dacades which is commensurate with human industrial activity:
As we can see, it's suddenly got a lot warmer since about 1980, which is what man-made climate change would predict.
However, Graph Two presents exactly the same data slightly differently and we get wildly different results:
As we can see, this shows a consistent, slow rise in temperature over 400 years, which is exactly what we would expect as we're still coming out of the medieval Little Ice Age. The problem is that so much data and advice and information is similarly presented by both sides in such mutually contradictory ways that eventually I give up trying to follow it and just say "I don't know". The recent evidence that the International Panel on Climate Change based their position on glacial melting on a single unattributed quote from a 1999 New Scientist article, and that University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit actively witheld negative cases in their research and tried to undermine peer review have only served to intensify my confusion, not make me any more confident in any one position. Similarly Mars is also growing warmer in line with sunspot activity and there's no people there (probably) to be belting out CO2; on the other hand, polar ice caps are shifting so plainly something is going on here.
So what conclusion to draw? And what should one do? Well, I already do all the stuff which gets put in "10 ways to reduce your carbon footprint" articles. I don't drive a car and I use lots of public transport. I turn off lights when I'm not in the room - not because I want to save the world, but because electricity costs money and I'm not going to pay for something I'm not using when I could be using that money for important things like booze and women. Similarly I always turn off the tap rather than running it, but that's because I grew up in a house with a water meter and I learned to do so when I was very young.
I do this stuff not because of the Ice Caps, but just because I'm frugal and waste costs money - I'd rather have my money in my pocket than someone elses.
So, for once, I'm not going to draw any conclusions. I'm not going to say 'Here's what I think and here's what to do about it'*, because I just don't know. Instead I'm going to throw open the floor and ask you lot what you think. Are you left similarly confused by the polarity of debate on whether people are changing the climate? Are people responsible for a changing climate, or is it sunspot activity? Or what?
*Despite that fact that whenever I do so on here I've had a 100% record of being right. Like that time in Feb 2005 when I predicted an economic crash and I got piled on by people telling me how wrong I was and how Gordon Brown was an econonic genius who'd ended boom and bust. Ha! Egg on your faces now, bozos.
