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2003-08-26 12:35 AM
glaciers and jungles

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Recent movies: Lain, Disc 2****; Farscape, II.2****; Lain, Disc 3/4?****; Evangelion 12-15****; Reptilian*; Return of Mothra I & II**;

Recent books: Judges; I Timothy; Schlatter, The Theology of the Apostles; John R. E. Bliese, The Greening of Conservative America; Shusaku Endo, Silence; Norton selections from Spenser, The Faerie Queene; excerpts from The Mystical Poetry of Rumi (trans. Arberry); Brust, The Lord of Castle Black;

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Figured out tonight why I, and probably others, have a much, much greater skepticism about climate change than any other aspect of environmentalist argument: climatology.

Slogging my way through Bliese's generally very good Greening of Conservative America, I've slowed to a crawl upon hitting the chapter about preventing climate change from global-scale artificial greenhouse effects. After also reading a Cato review of Free Market Environmentalism, I wondered why every other part of their cases was compelling to me, but not the climate-change discussion. I think it's the problem of "climatology". The discussions of pollution, forestation, water issues, and sprawl are all discussed in concrete terms, with conceivable parameters and some decent methods and causes. But climate change is discussed as extrapolated meteorology, a study which is still enormously undeveloped, still extremely speculative, and which has no experimental results to back its theories. For a "science", as most of us conceive it, it's almost fatally flawed.

Overcoming those levels of ingrained suspicion is practically rolling your political capital into a cigar and smoking it. Pollution, controls on toxins, efficient and environmentally-neutral sources of power, great! Lotsa voters. Everybody wants bloody clean air and water. But everybody knows nobody knows what the weather's gonna do, or how it works, fundamentally. Most of our gadgets are just getting us started on observing it. This is really skepticism in action. Scientisticism ought to be proud of how deeply it's succeeded in making the world doubt...

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