Reply To: Might the predictions of climate change be wrong? Or do you believe on faith!
First, let’s dispense with the nonsense over the term “model”. The climate deniers squalk about “it’s just a model” the way evolution deniers squalk about “it’s just a theory”. Modeling is how we do science. It’s part of the “scientific method” if you like that terminology. You can’t reject the process of theorizing or modeling without denying science completely.
Second, let’s dispense with the nonsense over nonlinear dynamics and complexity (the “butterfly effect”). Physical processes that can be described by nonlinear equations that have a feedback component often show sensitive dependence on initial conditions. That makes it difficult to predict whether it will rain in two weeks on Tuesday morning in your city.
That’s not climate, however. The climate models may fail in terms of predicting how much hotter it will get in Mexico City on a given year, and yet still be completely sound when it comes to how the Earth’s climate will progress over 30 years.
There are things that we don’t understand fully. It’s not completely clear how much melting of arctic permafrost will accelerate climate change through methane releases. Clouds and cloud reflectivity in different frequencies are really complex. Ocean current changes aren’t perfectly understood. The truth is, by dumping tens of billions of metric tons of carbon into the atmosphere each year we’re conducting a large, uncontrolled experiment with the planet. There will be continued revisions as we collect more data from this uncontrolled experiment.
However, at this point there’s about as much data supporting driven climate change as there was for evolution in the 1950s, or for cigarettes causing cancer in the 1980s. It has crossed the threshold where denying the fundamental conclusion is the realm of science-denying bias and not rationality.
The questions now for science are not whether this is happening, but rather on just how bad this is going to be. There’s an extent to which “how bad” is still an open question, but the evidence coming in is more along the lines of “really bad” to “catastrophically bad” rather than “only sorta bad”. There’s also debate over who will end up with catastrophically bad. So, for example, there’s still a question about whether and when the Great Plains of the U.S. will be turned into a dust bowl, or how much colder northern Europe will become if/as the Atlantic conveyor breaks down.
We are asking countries in the developing world to develop much more slowly in order to accommodate possibly flawed calculations.
No, we’re really not, or at very least that’s not clear. The transition to alternate energies is totally doable without significant damage to the developed world, and indeed with net long-term economic gains. See for example the work by the engineering team at Stanford, which assumes only current technologies: http://news.stanford.edu/pr/2015/pr-50states-renewable-energy-060815.html . There’s no reason necessarily to believe that the developing world can’t follow suit, though this gets into complex economic and political issues more than science.
Honestly, the way we are holding the developing world in debt peonage (along with some of the developed world, like Greece) likely has a much larger impact on development rate than any form of carbon tax will.
