I read NAAS, NSF, and a number of university publication abstracts daily. Not just on climate science, in fact, chiefly on other subjects where the information is more on the edge of understanding, and less on the edge of political maneuvering. (Subjects like particle physics, nanotechnology, and other emerging fields) I have no issue based agenda in this practice, I do it because everyone should read stuff that is hard to understand as often as possible.
I am not a scientist of any sort. However, I do try hard to understand the reports, and the scientific methodology, and the implications of the observations. Generally, I fail to completely understand the more esoteric aspects of the research, but I follow the basics fairly well, even in fields which hold little interest to me.
Global climate change is an observed phenomenon, not a theory. It has been observed by instruments, by inferences from proxy phenomenon, in real time, and in paleontological records over centuries. The rate of change is far outside of the usual range of fluctuations over almost all sections of observed records. The exceptions to that are the epochal events often referred to as Extinction Events. This is not a single observer’s opinion. This is repeated examinations, by large numbers of researchers, in widely varied fields of study. The change in climate now occurring has already had significant and measurable effects on biology, ecology, and in a feedback into climate as well.
Anthropogenic causation of climate change is a much more difficult premise to examine, in strict science methodology. However, in all the cases where I personally have observed the changes in the world around me, and the things that cause those changes, human actions are far more efficacious agents of those changes than natural cycles. Erosion will cut deep ravines through gentle slopes in places I once walked as a child. Bulldozers have removed entire mountains where I once stood looking over valleys. The huge stands of Chestnut trees that stood near my own home are gone. All of them are gone. Three trees survive. Two of them are dying. It was human actions that caused this.
Yes, it is theoretically possible that the sudden existence of a Northwest Passage, and the changes of hundreds of miles in the ranges of trees, birds, mosses, insects, and mammals over decades where centuries had passes without those changes are not caused by human actions. But no alternative explanation has ever been examined with the continuous rigor, and exacting measurement as the supposition that human actions are the cause.
There is no mystery here. There is no conspiracy to blame humans. There is a very obvious collusion by economically invested interests to support anyone willing to lend his credentials to denying that it is human action. Most people can’t be bothered to learn what the greenhouse effect really is, and how it really works. They would rather not consider laws that might require them to drive five miles an hour less, in a car that weighed a thousand pounds less.
When the folks on one side of the argument repeatedly bring up the same issues, and routinely ignore the strong evidence that those issues don’t have any real importance, or are simply not true, and then, when shown counter evidence, and shown repeated investigations of unrelated supportive evidence, reply by changing the subject, or saying that I am not listening, it becomes obvious that information is not the issue they have brought to the table.
The natural cycles that are accelerating the anthropogenic factors of climate change have already begun. The best time to act was thirty years ago. Permafrost isn’t going to refreeze now. The pH of the sea isn’t going to just stop dropping. Every year that passes before change in human action is forced onto the entrenched economic systems means more deaths, more suffering, and less likelihood that meaningful change can be made.
Unfortunately ignorance is easier than learning, and being selfish still works fine in the short term.
Near as I can tell, we are pretty much fucked.
Tris