Does the End Justify the Means?

My dad sent me an interesting article the other day on global warming. Here's a link to it.

This is an article by John Coleman, the meterologist who founded the Weather Channel in the U.S. In short, he believes global warming is a scam. I was somewhat taken aback by the lack of references, but this represented a short talk. Here's the expanded version (pdf file), for those who have the time for a forty-page document.

Those who've been with me a while can attest I've wavered violently back and forth on this. I occasionally like to revisit, because global warming, or the much more accurate "climate change", is still a hot-button issue with serious consequences for public policy.

Having read very widely pro and con, I get the sense that we just don't know what the hell's going on with climate. Just not knowing doesn't sit well with a certain class of scientist; it can lead to all sorts of distortions and misinterpretations of the data, turning specious assumptions into total convictions and dubious theories into reported facts. That's not the way the scientific method's supposed to work, but when your funding depends on a certain result, it's only human nature to try to achieve that result.

Is the climate changing? Of course it is. Nature's always changing--in fact, that's the definition. Do we have anything to do with climate change? Here we run into two very common, completely contradictory belief systems. One is that human beings are utterly powerless against the mighty force of Nature, and that nothing we do can have the slightest effect. The other is that we've risen so far above Nature and become so off-kilter that we're completely dominating the planet and screwing up every ecosystem going. The funny thing is, most people seem to be capable of believing one thing or the other, or both at once, depending on what they're trying to prove.

The biggest problem I have with climate change--even though I believe in it--is that it's the answer to every climatological conundrum. Is it too hot? Too cold? Too wet? Too dry? Global warming's your villain. Every extreme weather event, from the Mississippi floods to the drought in the southwestern U.S., is related to climate change. We had the snowiest winter ever here in Southern Ontario (quite cold, too); the Toronto Star proved conclusively that all that snow was the result of global warming.
This kind of know-it-all-ism irks me to no end. To my ear, it sounds almost like those people who claim the Bible has the answer to every question they've ever thought to ask. Climate change thus becomes a catch-all and paradoxically loses some of its alarm. I mean, if everything can be linked to climate change, why even bother? We're screwed. How do we change everything?

I've found in my short life that the more I think I know, the less I know for sure. I've had to overturn several deeply held beliefs in my life and it's bitchly hard work to do it. That said, I've learned that the more certain people are of anything, the more skeptical I should be about it.

I repeat: there's no doubt the climate is in flux. Giant ice shelves are breaking off in both the Arctic and Antarctic and there certainly does seem to be an increase in the number of violent storms, beyond what you'd expect in a media-saturated world that reports every last tornado al goreum. Anecdotally, I can report that after most of a lifetime keenly observing the weather (not the climate, the weather) where I am, I've come to a couple of conclusions: one, the sun is much stronger than it was even ten years ago; two, while the daytime high temperatures haven't changed overmuch, it's often much warmer at night than it used to be. Time was you could reliably estimate the daily low temperature, midsummer, would be approximately half the high (if it was 30 degrees at 4:00 p.m, it'd be about 15 at 4 a.m.) Nowadays, it's quite common to see night time lows in the twenties, with humidity indexes making it feel even hotter.

Though not this year. It's been pretty cool so far this summer: Environment Canada's calling for a very hot season, but it hasn't materialized yet. Could this have anything to do with the recent announcement that global warming's on hold for the next decade? No idea here: anyone with an idea's probably talking out of their hat.

Anyway...

What I find more interesting than the ongoing debate over whether climate change is happening or not, and if it is, whether we're responsible, and either way, if there's anything we can do about it--what I find more interesting is how people seem to line up on this issue according to their political beliefs. Conservatives are much more likely to debunk global warming, to point to every scientist who dares to question the orthodoxy and say it's proof the whole thing's a fraud. Liberals, for whatever reason, tend to fall into an unquestioning line behind those who link climate change to every drop of rain and glint of sun. Why is that, I wonder?

The liberals among us are supposed to be the eternal optimists, but if you extrapolate half the conclusions people have drawn with respect to global warming the world will spontaneously incinerate itself sometime in the next three minutes. Doesn't sound all that optimistic to me. Conservatives, on the other hand, are supposed to care for nothing beyond their own pocketbooks...but the fight against climate change represents a vast financial opportunity on both a global and a personal level.
Does it have something to do with the evangelical belief that we are to have God-given "dominion" over every living thing? Because if that's the case, it should be easy to accept we're changing the climate, yet many conservatives will look you in the eye and say we're not.
Or is it as simple as saying conservatives don't like change while liberals embrace it? You've got deniers (mostly on the right) and people fighting what to me is a hopeless rearguard action (on the left), with precious few people concerned about how we can adapt to climate change.

I keep digressing.

Coleman links the global warming "scam" to the price of gas, saying, in effect, that environmentalists have seized upon the global warming consensus to wean us off fossil fuels. He says this like it's a bad thing. Personally, I don't have a problem with junk science if it actually gets people off the oily tit. Because even if climate change is a myth, Peak Oil most certainly isn't.

There are so many good and salient reasons why we need to move away from oil, beyond GHG emissions and pollution. The biggest is that oil is getting more and more expensive. People still don't seem to understand this...it's almost as if they're wilfully blind in one eye.

"But we're pumping more and more oil all the time!"
"Yup, and the demand is still outpacing the supply. What does that tell you?"
"It tells me speculators are driving up the cost!"
"No, they're not. Demand is driving up the cost."
"But they say there's no problem with the supply!"
"Of course they say that. What would you expect them to say? 'Uh, folks, no need to, uh, panic, but we're running out of oil'? Look at the output from nearly every major oil field. They're all in decline."
"But look at all the new fields opening up in Uganda! They say it's up to 300 million barrels!"
"Holy crap, that sounds like a lot, doesn't it? That'd last the world almost three whole days!"
"Umm...."

Yes, umm. Another good reason to move away from oil--aside, as I say, from the nasty planetary effects--is that so much of it seems to be concentrated in politically unstable areas, places that have a deep, abiding hatred for all things us (or is that "U.S."?) It just doesn't seem smart to place your future in the hands of people who don't like you all that much. Ah, hell, people have been saying that since Jimmy Carter, and we're still lusting in our hearts for all that black gold. Even now, when people are increasingly willing to accept, provisionally, the idea that oil production might peak, I feel like I'm fighting a losing battle.

But I'll keep fighting. Eventually the climate will change.