Climate Change
sds writes:
[A] new study published online today in the journal Nature Geoscience … found that only about half of the warming that occurred during a natural climate change 55 million years ago can be explained by excess carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. What caused the remainder of the warming is a mystery.
Notes James Taranto (emphasis mine):
The Union of Concerned Scientists, a left-wing advocacy group, put out a press release claiming that the study shows “the potential consequences of global warming are likely worse than what scientists are predicting”—as if carbon is the only thing that can cause warming.
So first the global warmists insist that the question is settled beyond debate, then, when it turns out not to be, they insist that uncertainly can only mean their theory is even more true than they had thought. This just is not how real science operates.
Taranto’s position is absurd. Imagine your an EMT at the scene of an accident. There is blood everywhere. The driver appears to have a massive head wound. However, there seems to be too much blood for the head wound to be the only injury.
You know there is blood. You know there is a head wound. Everything you know about medicine tells you headwounds bleed and need immediate attention. There may be an additional injury causing additional blood loss—in which case the need for immediate action is even more pressing because something else is compounding the problem. Taranto’s seems to take the position that we should 1) question the existence of the head wound and 2) do nothing.
Edit: Since SDS and Bellatoris seemed to have trouble following my head wound analogy, let me try to clarify. While you’ll always find fringe voices that disagree with pretty much anything—the overwhelming bulk of the scientific community agrees that 1) the earth’s temperature is rising, and 2) rising CO2 levels are causing it the temperature to rise, and 3) a very significant portion of that CO2 increase is caused by human activity. If another study comes along and says that temperatures are actually rising faster than all the CO2 models suggest, this does not discredit the models. It might suggest that there is some other, unknown cause partially responsible for climate change. If anything, this makes action more urgent. The study suggests that there are some things we don’t know and should probably find out. It does not cast doubt on what we already know.
