I'm glad Al Gore won the Oscar. Personally, I found his film a little dry and pedantic, but it has clearly played an essential role in shifting the public debate on global warming. (Or are we now supposed to call global warming "the climate crisis," pace Gore?)
But it's worth remembering that our scientific models of global warming, although they seem accurate and are backed by an iron clad scientific consensus, will no doubt turn out to be wrong, at least in the details. This is just the nature of scientific models. As the respected scientific authors of Useless Arithmetic: Why Environmental Scientists Can't Predict the Future point out, nature is more complex than we can begin to imagine. It "depends on too many processes that are poorly understood or little monitored". We are overconfident in our predictions at our own peril.
This doesn't mean we should lapse into a false sense of security. In fact, just the opposite might be true. Marine biologists constructed intricate population models of Atlantic fish stocks, but the stocks collapsed anyways. Nobody expected open pit mining to create such toxic pools at the bottom of the pits. Climate scientists didn't expect the ozone hole to widen again, and nobody understands what's happening with the Greenland glaciers.
So I read stories like this with a real sense of dread:
Oysterman Jim Aguiar had never had to deal with the bacterium Vibrio parahaemolyticus in his 25 years working the frigid waters of Prince William Sound.The dangerous microbe infected seafood in warmer waters, like the Gulf of Mexico. Alaska was way too cold.
But the sound was gradually warming. By summer 2004, the temperature had risen just enough to poke above the crucial 59-degree mark. Cruise ship passengers who had eaten local oysters were soon coming down with diarrhea, cramping and vomiting -- the first cases of Vibrio food poisoning in Alaska that anyone could remember.
"We were slapped from left field," said Aguiar, who shut down his oyster farm that year along with a few others.
As scientists later determined, the culprit was not just the bacterium, but the warming that allowed it to proliferate.
"This was probably the best example to date of how global climate change is changing the importation of infectious diseases," said Dr. Joe McLaughlin, acting chief of epidemiology at the Alaska Division of Public Health, who published a study on the outbreak.
Here's the scary moral: we might not even know about the worst side-effects of global warming yet.
Comments (7)
Nice post. It appears that a lot of people have access to articles that claim warming, but articles about record cold temps in the midwest or the freeze in California that killed fruit crops are always underplayed. The problem with global warming is that everything has been so politicized that its hard for the average person to know whats really going on. I just read an article the other day about a meteorologist who wouldnt speak critically against global warming because it was politically incorrect to do so. Is this how science works now? He mentioned that he knows of many other TV meteorologists who were far from 100% certain that its man-made. I know that there is evidence that its happening, but i personally dont know the exact cause because its been so skewed that people are stuck believing whoever has the best "ad" campaign either for or against it. This is unfortunate. Hopefully someday soon it will fall out of the political agenda so that real scientists can openly and honestly analyze and discuss it without the threat of having their certification revoked (Yes, the weather channel expert wants certifcations revoked if meteorologists question that global warming is man made. Just Google: "Weather Channel Climate Expert Calls for Decertifying Global Warming Skeptics" ).
--Brett
Posted by: Brett | February 26, 2007 1:58 PM