Climate of Opinion
February 5, 2007
This WSJ editorial seems to offer a soberer view of the recent UN report on global warming
The document that caused such a stir was only a short policy report, a summary of the full scientific report due in May. Written mainly by policymakers (not scientists) who have a stake in the issue, the summary was long on dire predictions. The press reported the bullet points, noting that this latest summary pronounced with more than “90% confidence” that humans have been the main drivers of warming since the 1950s, and that higher temperatures and rising sea levels would result.
Maybe we ought to wait until May before we start drawing conclusions about what the UN committee is really saying about the impact of global warming on future generations.
While everyone concedes that the Earth is about a degree Celsius warmer than it was a century ago, the debate continues over the cause and consequences. We don’t deny that carbon emissions may play a role, but we don’t believe that the case is sufficiently proven to justify a revolution in global energy use. The economic dislocations of such an abrupt policy change could be far more severe than warming itself, especially if it reduces the growth and innovation that would help the world cope with, say, rising sea levels. There are also other problems — AIDS, malaria and clean drinking water, for example — whose claims on scarce resources are at least as urgent as climate change.
The IPCC report should be understood as one more contribution to the warming debate, not some definitive last word that justifies radical policy change. It can be hard to keep one’s head when everyone else is predicting the Apocalypse, but that’s all the more reason to keep cool and focus on the actual science.
I’m reminded of two things. First, in college I learned the hard way that charting and basing conclusions on a set of data taken recently is not a trivial pursuit. Trying to draw valid conclusions based on data taken over a period of a century boggles my mind.
Second, a favorite book of mine is The Visual Display of Quantitative Information by Edward R. Tufte. Published in 1983, it has become a classic that points out that charts of data often can mislead. A given set of data often can be made to imply opposite conclusions just by charting the data differently.
Dave, remaining a tad skeptical about global warming.
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Consider the source; the WSJ tends to take a business-oriented rather than a scientific view of such issues.
When glaciers throughout the world which have been in place for thousands of years begin to melt away, a well-documented phenomenon in recent decades, it understandably makes climate scientists, who study such things, a bit apprehensive. Business types don’t study such things, generally. But they do write opinion pieces for the WSJ.