
New ice age? Don't count on it - ColinWright
http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/shortsharpscience/2011/06/new-ice-age-dont-count-on-it.html
======
muppetman
With these sorts of articles now I'm never quite sure what to believe.

Now before you jump in to mock me, it's just that I don't have time to keep
really up-to-date with climate change anymore. Are we really getting warmer?
Are we cooling? What's causing it?

For each article I read that tells me one thing, a few days later another
comes out and tells me the previous one was wrong and here's why.

I hope that this article's right and being New Scientist I have a lot more
faith in it. I just wish I had more time to understand all the factors of
climate change for myself.

~~~
guelo
FUD. That's the point of the decades long propaganda campaign by the energy
companies. If they can't convince you outright they at least want to create
the confusion and doubt.

~~~
Typhon
Doubt is a very good thing.

It's propaganda versus propaganda now. I will never forgive whoever has made
global warming a political issue, because it means debating rationally about
it has become impossible.

Climate is a very complicated thing, especially when studied on a planetary
scale. It's a bunch of chaotic parameters, and any prediction about it is
likely to be wrong, or imprecise.

Much of science works that way, but problems arise when you need to make
political decisions about such matters. You can't make large-scale decisions
that will affect millions based on flimsy predictions that may turn out to be
wrong.

~~~
ugh
So, how exactly couldn’t it be a political issue?

~~~
Typhon
By focusing public attention on something else. It's not as if we had a
shortage of problems. Then, the matter of climate change could be settled in a
scientific manner, as opposed to a religious debate involving legions of
people who don't know what they're talking about.

Obviously, i'm being unrealistic. Once it's become politicized, it's already
too late.

~~~
arethuza
Deciding whether or not there is climate change and what is causing it is a
scientific question.

What do to about it _is_ a political decision.

~~~
DougWebb
No, deciding what to do about it is an engineering decision.

Deciding to actually do what the engineers say is the best way to deal with
the problem, based on the science, is the only political decision.

~~~
ugh
Engineers can't do that. You have to give them a goal and then you have to
decide whether you like their plan for achieving the goal. The political
process becomes important before engineers spring into action.

------
nagrom
I'd love to see more engineering efforts going towards improving our standard
of living regardless of what the climate does. By all means, worry about
whether the planet is getting warmer or cooler or a bit of both dependent on
the place...but let's find a way to live regardless of CO2-induced warming,
sunspot rarity or some other, unforeseen dramatic change.

A lot of the political and societal measures are aimed at making energy more
expensive, reducing consumption and promoting a rather righteous view of how
people should live. Why not spend the same effort to promote technologies that
allow people to live however they want in a way that is sustainable regardless
of the environment?

~~~
Tichy
I don't think the aim of politics is to make people's live more miserable.
Energy is being made more expensive to account for the externalities . The
markets can then figure out how to make us live well with the proper energy
costs.

What kind of tech promotion do you imagine, other than more efficient energy
production and consumption?

~~~
nagrom
I do genuinely believe that a lot of the reporting and comment on climate-
related issues is a form of frenzy by the people involved - not rationally
thought-out but a tendency on one side to claim that nothing's wrong and
everything's fine (for optimists) and on the other to claim that everyone's
going to die and terrible things will happen (for pessimists). The debate is
too polarised to be useful, or even interesting, any more. Mixed-in with that,
there are politicians, corporations and pressure groups seeking to distort the
issue so as to create more power or profit.

I'd love to see more promotion given to sustainable agriculture that's
tolerant of temperature drops or rises, city-structures that re-use the heat
that they give off for something productive, research into how to build and
live effectively in regions subject to hurricanes or earthquakes that don't
come down to rebuild-everything-every-30-years, flood defences that are
something more than 'build-a-wall', etc. I'm not saying that these things
don't exist, but we spend so much time talking about how to change societies
(unfeasibly, in my opinion) so as to mitigate climate change and not very much
on what to do to mitigate that change into sustainable habitats.

~~~
Tichy
"The debate is too polarised to be useful, or even interesting, any more"

Except that is probably part of the strategy - FUD. If you give up, the people
in control are free do act as they please.

How do you propose to give incentives for development of those things you
suggest? Don't you think more expensive energy would make people build more
efficient things, recycle better, create cleaner energy?

~~~
nagrom
It is part of the strategy - and one I have no heart to fight. There is simply
no point in listening when the signal-to-noise ratio is too low and your
chances of effecting the outcome are minimal.

Yes, expensive energy may do that - but is it the best way to do it? I would
have thought that anyone who manages to do those things would probably make
money from it regardless of whether the government takes a cut or not.

------
marknutter
Don't count on it? Honestly, I'm not counting on anything involving the
climate.

------
hyko
The Earth has been in an ice age since the Pleistocene. This is an
interglacial period.

~~~
hugh3
Yep, and we still don't understand what causes ice ages.

Let's stop and think about that for a minute. We're still pretty darn ignorant
of the climate. Look at a plot of temperature over the last mere million
years. Climate scientists will at this point tell you they know all about the
variation over the last few decades. But point to the huge swings that occur
on ten-thousand-year timescales and periodically freeze the entire Earth over
and they'll say "Yeah, well y'know, that could be a number of things..."

Climate science is a dodgy form of science. Too many model parameters, too few
observations.

~~~
theclay
Climate Science isn't a science. For science to be science, you have to
control for variables.

When you can't--like with climate studies--you rely on intuition instead.
That's a social science.

~~~
hugh3
That's going a bit far.

It's all well and good to come up with a model for what the climate should do
based on basic physics. The main trouble with climate prediction is that we
don't have enough data points to check whether the models are really correct.

I do physical modelling for a living, but I know not to trust a fitted-but-
untested model any further than I can comfortably spit a rat.

------
Shenglong
My friend writes: _Also, the 10-12 year cycle of sunspots does not have a
significant effect on climate. In fact, the climate scientists desperately
trying to find other causes of global warming investigated them thoroughly,
studies show that the change in solar insolation to be roughly one and a half
orders of magnitude smaller than needed to be comparable to the current
temperature changes. The temperature decrease from even the little ice age was
less than a third of the temperature increase we've already experienced, and
you know we're in for another three times that best case scenario. A little
ice age now would be a wonderful coincidence, but would hardly change the dire
outlook as the heating well surpasses it. That fortuitous event would only
effect the price we put on carbon by ~1/3_ 1/3. _

------
Produce
Right, so there was a grand minima between 1645-1715, which has been widely
attributed to the last mini-ice age and yet there is no way that this one can
do the same because our models do not predict it, even though our models
couldn't predict the current grand minima in the first place. From a logical
standpoint, this argument makes absolutely no sense and suggests that the
model is incorrect.

------
J3L2404
Anyone have a link to the BBC coverage of this story?

