Which of these warnings came from any large number of people actually working in climatology?
I remember the "ice age" fears in the 70's too. I also remember the people who got the most milage out of them were right-wingers who wanted a larger budget for the space program. There weren't many people interested in climate modeling in those days because the computers simply weren't up to the task. Chaos theory was only discovered in 1971, and didn't gain much ground until the mid 80's, and without it climat modelling is nearly useless.
Yes, there were a few climatologists who knew the climate was cooling in the 70's, but they had no knowledge of longer term trends in climate, nor any real analytical tools for understanding climate change. They were speculating, as most of them admitted then. Now, we do know a lot about long term climate change, and we have science that just wasn't available then.
No responsible chemist or climatologist claimed that we were all going to fry because of the loss of the ozone layer. Even in the 70's, they knew that ozone loss would tend to cool the planet. There were, and still are, quite a lot of fears about the impact of ozone loss on ecosystems, and as far as I can tell from the peer reviewed literature, most of the fears have come at least partially true.
> The only common element in all these theories is the psychological
> predisposition of their proponents. They are the outlook of the petit-
> bourgeois, for whom historical events are always external, dominating
> forces, that cannot be understood. The myth of impending doom is
> interwoven into the imaginative life of the middle classes. It is
> indicative of their absence of an inner life, and ultimate dependency
> upon events outside of their control.
Even if true, how does this undermine the science involved? Human effects are on the order of magnitude to have the kind of impact even the most extreme global warming predictions call for. Climate models aren't 100% accurate, but as someone who worked in the modelling of physical systems as a student, I can tell you that you ignore them at your peril. Complex systems like climate have unpredicatable results - this can be demostrated mathematically - and when you put pressures of sufficiently large orders of magnitude on such a system, you may not know what the outcome will be for certain, but you can reasonably expect them to be equally large or greater.
> Sometimes these angst-fests have an element of truth in them. But mostly
> they are massive overstatements of the danger of human extinction which
> imaginatively re-present the actual precariousness of middle class
existence.
I suspect that there is some overstatement. Life has persisted on Earth through much worse, and humans are very clever animals who aren't likely to let themselves go extinct because of a shift in climate. However, that doesn't mean it will be any fun. I consider millions (possibly billions) of deaths and billions (probably trillions) of dollars of economic loss a big deal, even if humanity lives through it.
Let's take the scenario where the Gulf Stream shifts or diminishes in size, and the temperature of Northern Europe drops dramitically. Humanity can live through that, we've lived through worse. But how many people's lives would be disrupted at great cost to themselves and others? How many European economies would fall to pieces? This isn't a trivial consideration.
Global warming brings with it a near certainty of major changes on a scale of sufficient size to do real damage to people's lives. Even if we aren't risking extinction, or even the end of civilisation, it's not just some scare.
> Most pointedly, the source of the anxiety is entirely interchangeable -
> mongol hoards or global warming all express the same emotional state.
Even if so, this isn't a good argument for ignoring global warming as a serious issue. It is a good argument for ignoring what most people think about it (and everything the press thinks about it), and finding out yourself by reading the journals and talking to actual researchers.
Science journalism in the popular press, and especially on TV, is invariably, incredibly, unbelievably bad. If you want to understand what's really going on, avoid popular media completely, but don't avoid the issues raised by science, especially environmental science.
Scott Martens
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