Climate Change as an Act of Faith?

There's no question that 2009 was an interesting year for the science and politics of climate change. Both this report and this one provided new syntheses of the issue, two of the most recent summaries of an ongoing and growing flood of research demonstrating the reality of global warming. The United Nations World Meteorological Organization and NASA independently announced that the first decade of the twenty-first century was the warmest on record so far, with 2009 among the warmest years ever.

And yet, the Copenhagen process of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change ended without a binding agreement, which depending on the observer's perspective was either an important step forward or an unmitigated disaster. However, the apparent determination of many governments to persist in a search for an agreement seemed to underline the seriousness with which the issue is increasingly regarded.

There nonetheless remain those who dispute or dismiss the evidence of global climate change, with some insisting that the world is presently cooling and some convinced that the hacking of e-mail servers at the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, together with the selective release of some of the e-mails, has proven that the entire theory of global warming is one great giant conspiracy. If anything, the advocates of such a view have hardened in their belief, leaping upon and claiming as further evidence in their favor, an error concerning the likely (or unlikely) disappearance of Himalayan glaciers in the latest Assessment Report issued by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. 

There are those who are so obsessed with the notion that the whole thing is a scam that no amount of evidence, it seems, will divert from them their belief that the whole thing is just a big con. Never mind, as George Monbiot has sarcastically observed in imagining how a missive circulated among the conspirators might look, that such a conspiracy would require a prodigious amount of coordination, cover-up, and logistics, to say nothing of nearly two centuries of foresight:

For 185 years since the Master, known to the laity as Joseph Fourier, launched his scheme for world domination, the entire physical science community has been working towards this moment. The early phases of the plan worked magnificently. First the Master’s initial thesis - that the release of infrared radiation is delayed by the atmosphere - had to be accepted by the scientific establishment ... [Then we installed] Svante Arrhenius first as professor of physics at Stockholm University, then as rector. From this position he was able to project the Master’s second grand law - that the infrared radiation trapped in a planet’s atmosphere increases in line with the quantity of carbon dioxide the atmosphere contains. He and his followers (led by the Junior Warden Max Planck) were then able to adapt the entire canon of physical and chemical science to sustain the second law. Then began the most hazardous task of all: our attempt to control the instrumental record ... Our co-option of the physical world has been just as successful. The thinning of the Arctic ice cap was a masterstroke. The ring of secret nuclear power stations around the Arctic Circle, attached to giant immersion heaters, remains undetected, as do the space-based lasers dissolving the world’s glaciers. Altering the migratory and reproductive patterns of the world’s wildlife has proved more challenging. Though we have now asserted control over the world’s biologists, there is no accounting for the unauthorized observations of farmers, gardeners, bird-watchers and other troublemakers. We have therefore been forced to drive migrating birds, fish and insects into higher latitudes, and to release several million tonnes of plant pheromones every year to accelerate flowering and fruiting. None of this is cheap, and ever more public money, secretly diverted from national accounts by compliant governments, is required to sustain it.

The implausibility of conspiracies aside, there IS a huge and growing amount of evidence supporting the theory that Earth is warming as a result of human activity. Not everyone who questions the science of climate change buys into the conspiracy theory; some think that the science is just wrong, or that scientists feel pressured to come up with results that support the theory of anthropogenic climate change and ignore contrary evidence.

And some folks just don't know what to believe.

Well, here's one basic observation we can make, as a matter of fact, not opinion.

Carbon dioxide IS a greenhouse gas. That is a fact. Its properties in that regard have been long established and can be seen on worlds such as Venus, as well as our own. Levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide ARE increasing in line with fossil fuel emissions. That is also a fact.

Given that starting point, it takes a true leap of faith - and contorted justifications - to then assert that Earth either (a) is not warming despite such increases or (b) is warming, but for some other reason. It takes yet more of a leap of faith to then argue that the observed consequences of warming in fact have nothing to do with warming at all, or if they do, well, that warming is entirely natural and nothing to worry about.

Over the next several days, we will be posting some of the more common myths and misconceptions about climate change science, and offering brief explanations, with supporting links, of the truth about that science. For those who are genuinely unsure what to believe, they will, I hope, prove helpful in cutting through the fog of uncertainty. (For those who are resolutely wedded to the notion of climate-change-as-conspiracy, and Discovery-News-as-a-pawn-in-that-conspiracy, it will be another opportunity to don the tinfoil hats and look out for black helicopters).

In the meantime, as a thumbnail summary of the rationale for regarding climate change as something more than an act of faith, I quote from this interview I recently conducted with John Cook of Skeptical Science:

We can have the most confidence in scientific results when we have multiple lines of measurement showing the same thing. With global warming, there are multiple lines of evidence that all point to humans being the main contributor.

For starters, we know exactly how much carbon dioxide is being added to the air. We can double-check that by measuring carbon isotopes in the atmosphere. We can triple-check that by measuring the amount of oxygen in the air to see if the amount of oxygen is falling in line with the fossil fuel burning. So we know we’re causing the rise in CO2.

Now the next step is: What are the effects of all the CO2 in the air? And we can measure that by satellites that measure how much radiation is escaping from Earth out into space. And what they are observing is that there is less radiation escaping at the very wavelengths that greenhouse gases absorb energy. So that’s the human fingerprint, that CO2 is trapping heat. Another confirmation of this is that surface measurements also measure the amount of radiation that is coming back down from the atmosphere, and they find the same thing: That there is more radiation coming back down at the very wavelengths that greenhouse gases trap heat. So there are multiple lines of evidence that CO2 is trapping heat.

Then there’s a mountain of evidence that Earth is warming. We have surface temperature, we also have satellites measuring the atmosphere temperature. We’ve got ocean buoys going down to 2,000 meters and measuring ocean heat, finding that the oceans are accumulating heat.

And then there’s all little signs, all throughout the climate: Species are migrating at different times because the seasons are changing, the distribution of plants and forests are slowly moving up toward the poles because it’s getting hotter in the tropics …

Lots of all these different measurements, all pointing to the same results. It’s not all dependent on one little piece of data; it’s not all dependent on the hockey stick, or on the data that comes from the University of East Anglia. The evidence is fairly clear and all points to one result: That humans are the main contributor to global warming.