"[T]he natural world around us does not care what we believe."

The intersection of two earlier posts (What have you changed your mind about? and Climate 'clearly out of balance' ) leaves us with these thoughts about climate change, from two very interesting minds:
In The Irrelevance of "Probability" Nicholas Nassim Taleb (author of The Black Swan) writes

As I said, consider that belief (i.e., epistemology) and action (i.e., decision-making), the way they are practiced, are largely not consistent with one another.

Let us apply the point to the current debate on carbon emissions and climate change. Correspondents keep asking me if it the climate worriers are basing their claims on shoddy science, and whether, owing to nonlinearities, their forecasts are marred with such a possible error that we should ignore them. Now, even if I agreed that it were shoddy science; even if I agreed with the statement that the climate folks were most probably wrong, I would still opt for the most ecologically conservative stance — leave planet earth the way we found it. Consider the consequences of the very remote possibility that they may be right, or, worse, the even more remote possibility that they may be extremely right.

In his essay The importance of doing something now about the environment Craig Venter (Human Genome Decoder; Director, The J. Craig Venter Institute) writes

Like many or perhaps most I wanted to believe that our oceans and atmosphere were basically unlimited sinks with an endless capacity to absorb the waste products of human existence. I wanted to believe that solving the carbon fuel problem was for future generations and that the big concern was the limited supply of oil not the rate of adding carbon to the atmosphere. The data is irrefutable--carbon dioxide concentrations have been steadily increasing in our atmosphere as a result of human activity since the earliest measurements began. We know that on the order of 4.1 billion tons of carbon are being added to and staying in our atmosphere each year. We know that burning fossil fuels and deforestation are the principal contributors to the increasing carbon dioxide concentrations in our atmosphere. Eleven of the last twelve years rank among the warmest years since 1850. While no one knows for certain the consequences of this continuing unchecked warming, some have argued it could result in catastrophic changes, such as the disruption of the Gulf Steam which keeps the UK out of the ice age or even the possibility of the Greenland ice sheet sliding into the Atlantic Ocean. Whether or not these devastating changes occur, we are conducting a dangerous experiment with our planet. One we need to stop.
. . .
Our planet is in crisis, and we need to mobilize all of our intellectual forces to save it. One solution could lie in building a scientifically literate society in order to survive. There are those who like to believe that the future of life on Earth will continue as it has in the past, but unfortunately for humanity, the natural world around us does not care what we believe. But believing that we can do something to change our situation using our knowledge can very much affect the environment in which we live.
[Emphasis mine]

Climate 'clearly out of balance'

As reported last week by the BBC, the 50,000 member American Geophysical Union (AGU) has updated its policy position, first adopted in 2003, on Human Impacts on Climate. The policy position, "revised and reaffirmed" in December 2007 begins by stating:

The Earth's climate is now clearly out of balance and is warming. Many components of the climate system—including the temperatures of the atmosphere, land and ocean, the extent of sea ice and mountain glaciers, the sea level, the distribution of precipitation, and the length of seasons—are now changing at rates and in patterns that are not natural and are best explained by the increased atmospheric abundances of greenhouse gases and aerosols generated by human activity during the 20th century.

Here's James J. McCarthy, then president-elect of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), writing in March 2007 in a published letter to the New York Times

To the Editor:

The National Academy of Sciences, the American Geophysical Union, the American Meteorology Society and the American Association for the Advancement of Science have all issued statements stating that climate change is: a) occurring, b) largely caused by humans and c) likely to continue with large negative consequences for natural and human socioeconomic systems unless we rapidly decarbonize our global energy systems.

People who have evidence that contradicts these statements can publish their findings in scientific journals, after which the public might expect to see this work discussed in Science Times. In the meantime, if you feel obligated to publish what are simply opinions, please use the opinion pages rather than the science section.

James J. McCarthy
Cambridge, Mass.

The writer is the president-elect of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

The current AAAS position is summarized in the AAAS Board of Directors Statement on Climate Change:

The scientific evidence is clear: global climate change caused by human activities is occurring now, and is a growing threat to society. Accumulating data from across the globe reveal a wide array of effects....
The statement was approved on 9 December 2006 and released on 18 February at the AAAS Annual Meeting in San Francisco.

I was at that AAAS Annual Meeting in San Francisco, and attended the plenary lecture by Susan Soloman, Senior Scientist at NOAA and co-chair of the IPCC Working Group I which "assesses the physical scientific aspects of the climate system and climate change." At the conclusion, I recall feeling that the evidence would certainly convince any reasonably thinking person. My notes from that meeting include:

• The IPCC doesn't do science; it assesses.
  
• The review process included two reviews, and 600 reviewers; there were 30000 comments received.
  
• We must distinguish between weather and climate; climate is non-local, and deals in averages.
• Analysis of: tree rings, corals, bore holes
• Attribution: Natural forcings that hold out anthropogenic causes do not match the observed data; when anthropogenic causes are included, the models match the data.
  
• Key Conclusions:
  1. Warming of the climate system is unequivocal
  2. It is very likely (>90%) that this warming is due to greenhouse gasses
  

If you want to check out the science, I'd start with the IPCC's Working Group I report, The Physical Science Basis, in particular the Summary for Policymakers (pdf) and Technical Summary (pdf).

Michael Shermer (founder of the Skeptics Society) wrote a column in the June 2006 Scientific American titled The Flipping Point: How the evidence for anthropogenic global warming has converged to cause this environmental skeptic to make a cognitive flip.

My own view is as follows:
At this point, the debate over anthropogenic climate change appears to me to have taken on the pattern of the creation-evolution debate, which I've been following for -- has it been 30 years now?!? By that I mean, at its core, it has ceased to be much of a scientific debate, but is rather a social issue. Yes, there is (some) uncertainty, but science is a very conservative enterprise, and yet there is broad and deep scientific consensus on this issue. It strains credulity to imagine a scientific cabal of this magnitude mindlessly worshiping Al Gore.
Anti-evolutionists chip around the edges of what is at this point one of the most strongly confirmed theories of science. The anti-anthropogenic climate change (aacc?) arguments seem to me to similarly chip at the fringes where there is debate and admitted uncertainty.
And again, it's not as if the science for this grew ex nihilo from atmospheric scientists after repeated viewings of An Inconvenient Truth. The IPCC was established 20 years ago. I've got Science News articles (yes, hard copy, in a manilla folder!) related to ozone layer depletion and global warming dating back to 1992.

There will be "greenwashing." There will be lazy and hyped reporting from the "Beast Without a Brain." But in the end, we should heed Richard Feynman's famous conclusion to his report on the shuttle Challenger accident: "For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled."