On the Inconvenient Complexity of Climate Science
And why it matters to not pretend that we know more than we do
By MARTIN REZNY
Thanks for the cool reply, reminds me of the basic premise of Feyerabend’s Against Method essay. Especially the part where you say that every physics theory does fail in some region (meaning we don’t yet have a perfect theory of anything). I’ve read your other response to the original article and I do agree that the scientific method is not (most importantly) the same thing as a currently accepted consensus by the majority of living scientists in a given field.
Climate science is one of the few specifically where I’ve actually gone back and forth over the years. Initially, I didn’t question the consensus that CO2 driven climate change is a thing, then I’ve heard a lot of interesting arguments about all the other potential driving factors and good questioning of the temperature measurements throughout history and especially of the climate models and their predictive accuracy, which made me skeptical for a while. Then I’ve read strong responses to all of those, so I was more inclined to accept the consensus again.
Notice: This means I don’t have a default political position on the matter.
But what you say about it in your other response, which are some arguments that are new to me still, makes me want to reconsider again. I especially really like, and have to verify, your breakdown of what the 97% consensus in climatology actually means in the broader context of what all other closely related natural scientists believe. I hope it’s not a fake fact, since I hate being manipulated, or when people do sloppy debating. But if it is true, it does put things into perspective. Regardless of that, there’s just so much we don’t know about weather and climate even today.
It’s one thing to understand how one substance acts under laboratory conditions, it’s another to know that there are many possible ways for it to interact with everything else in nature, and yet another to disentangle the exact chain (or complex) of events to have any true predictive capability. Post hoc (retrospective, after the fact) adjustments of models to fit observed data is really not a very strongly scientific procedure to base a scientific discipline around. Especially under conditions so complex that chaos theory does likely apply, which posits that some things are so complex they’re in fact beyond being even hypothetically calculable.
But of course different sciences do what they must, which is to try to make do with the best that they have at their disposal. I think the only truly safe assumptions so far in climate are that there’s not enough of anything in the environment to naturally push Earth to Venus runaway scenario, and that we also cannot naturally lose radiation shielding to the extent to which Mars did to cause the other climate extreme. Barring a very random, out of the blue act of the universe, of course. Or how Nassim Nicholas Taleb calls it, a black swan event.
One futurist/scientist whose channel I follow on YouTube, Isaac Arthur, also explained that even if all of the ice melted on the poles, there would be a) most of the landmass left, and b) entirely possible option of building a sufficient wall/dyke around essentially all of the coasts in the (inhabited) world. If anyone reading this is interested in a different kind of facts and projections relevant to the climate change debate, check the video out:
That said, I’m not necessarily mad at alarmists, but for reasons that have more to do with game theory. If we’re trying not to die out as a species, a false alarm is not as bad, however costly in economic terms, as missing the only window of opportunity to save ourselves. Even once, since extinction level events tend to be rather irreversible. With that said again, as Isaac Arthur keeps saying, it’s very hard to make an intelligent, tool-using species go extinct under almost any kind of circumstances. Hence things like massive dykes, assuming we don’t spend all of our wall-building budget on the border of Mexico.
I did also look into more of your responses, and responses to responses, where you argue with people who seem uncritically enforcing the consensus, quite possibly for political reasons of their own. Because yeah, it is possible for both “sides” to be unscientific in their own ways. Anyway, I noticed it does get a bit heated. I personally try to avoid politically charged clashes whenever possible. It serves no constructive purpose — a fight is a fight, not a debate, there’s nothing to be learned. Unless one observes it as a sociologist, I guess.
Your calm, well-reasoned responses stand on their own. Haters gonna hate no matter what. Losing one’s calm never adds any credibility to what they’re saying, only the opposite. But again, this is not a debate that needs to be won for political reasons. We could debate whether or not the budget reallignment by Trump from climate research to NASA will overall end up being a net positive or a net negative for humanity, since it’s not like NASA is useless in regard to climate things. But again, the only right way to do that would be with calm, well-reasoned arguments. It doesn’t get to be good or bad just on the basis of who’s made the decision, or who voted for whom.
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