Two different agendas continue to evolve, but with increasing and disturbing convergence: Climate and Energy, which I have previously dubbed: Clim-Ergy.
Andrew Revkin's blog regarding last week's duel on Climate Change in the Wall Street Journal and a follow-up post discuss the ongoing debate within the scientific community regarding the merits of the Climate Change proposition. Finally, in a muted sense of desperation (I infer) Mr. Revkin added this post at the end of the week, seeking a path to some common ground on which consensus can evolve.
Mr. Revkin is a voice of reason among those who believe that Climate Change is real and serious. He has endeavored to hold true to the facts that he knows, to acknowledge what is not yet known and rightfully open to serious debate, and to respectfully challenge positions that are deficient in fact and logic. The efforts of Mr. Revkin and like-minded advocates of Climate Change are, however, undermined by efforts by a self appointed truth squad comprised of the League of Conservation Voters, 360.org, and Forecast the Facts to hold meteorologists accountable in declaring their beliefs on climate change and duly reflecting them in their interpretation of weather events and trends.
I can appreciate the frustration of these groups to some small degree. I've heard more than one 'weather personality' (can't always tell which ones are degreed meteorologists and which ones got their degrees out of a box of Fruit Loops with a magic decoder ring) take some patently stupid positions on climate change, using examples that a seventh grader could challenge. But the notion that meteorologists should submit to a litmus test on Climate Change, like prospective Supreme Court justices on abortion, is utterly absurd.
There seems to be a turf battle between many in the meteorology and climatology communities that suggests that they are, above all else, humans sharing the same frailties as the rest of us. Too often, the science seems to take a back seat to ego, or so it seems to this outsider.
I don't expect meteorologists to take a position on climate change, any more than I expect climatologists to predict the weather in Guilford for the next 10 days. Neither is really capable of the other's work. This seems somewhat ironic because weather is climate on the instalment basis. But it is mere noise in a vastly complex and long cycle system. While climatologists and meteorologists may share a data set, they look at it from very different perspectives, as appropriate to their specific purposes.
To use an analogy, I look to Ben Bernanke to give me a sense of where the economy may go over the next ten years as an extrapolation of today's structural dynamics. But I wouldn't look to him for advice in picking stocks when the exchanges open tomorrow. That's not his skill set. Nor would I look to a professional stock trader (the market equivalent of a meteorologist) to tell me what the scenarios for the economy are likely to be for the next ten years. Different skill set; different data set. But they both speak in dollars.
What I do expect of meteorologists, and get too rarely, is factual perspective on weather events to put them in meteorological perspective, not climatic perspective. And I expect meteorologists to speak to what they know within their professional competence and the facts. Too many have gone off the ranch and deserve to be hit by bolts of lightning in the subject matter of climate.
But some in the Climate Community are no better. To the East Anglia crowd we can now add the League of Conservation Voters, et al, in their truth squad campaign. The silliness begins with the title 'Forecast Facts'. You don't forecast facts. You don't predict facts, unless you presume to be Nostradamus, which is a whole nother problem. You forecast POSSIBILITIES and PROBABILITIES based on known historical facts, and inferred dynamics that suggest trends.
I share the frustration of the League of Conservation Voters that there is not a consensus on whether or not the planet is warming among a profession that should at least know that much, but their truth-squad-taking-names strategy is no answer. It is a form of intimidation, no better than the right wing attorney general who has investigated a climate scientist at a state university.
Getting back to Mr. Revkin's third post seeking common ground, I wish him luck. On a much smaller scale, I have sought this within my own community by urging my government to adopt measurements of climatic factors as they relate specifically to Guilford that can establish a fact base that people can identify with through their own direct observations, and move the subject beyond conjecture on global predictions of little direct correlation to our specific circumstances. We have only now begun, after seven years, to take tentative steps in that direction. By the time the process bears fruit, I suspect that events will overtake it. We may arrive at the desired destination, but lost valuable time in the process. And once we have established the premise beyond reasonable doubt, the debate will begin around reasonable response with equal division and ferocity.
But it is Mr. Revkin's first blog that holds the true seed of common ground to Climate Change, except that it's in Energy. The solution to the Climate Change dilemma, as noted in a quote from economist Gary Yohe, is to deal with it through the idiom of the Constrained Energy Dilemma, recognizing energy as an exhaustible resource in the long term, and taxing it accordingly in the short term to accomplish the rationing that the capitalistic market mechanism are unwilling or incapable of doing. (See Clim-Ergy: It's About Time and The False Economics of Fossil Fuels ) Reducing the demand for energy will reduce the carbon footprint, and thus reduce the risk of the worst projections for climate change. It will also create economic benefits that should be a motivator, unless your dividends are earned and you pay stub is punched in the fossil fuel industries.
And that's where the argument comes full circle, and even Dr. Yohe's perceptive solution hits the opposite side of the same brick wall confronting climate change. The road to consensus on energy policy is no less strewn with dogmatic debris than the one on climate change.
Clim-Ergy. The two issues are inextricably linked. They must be dealt with as such, dealt with directly, and dealt with now. There are no shortcuts or detours on the road to our destiny.
Onward
20120205
Copyright 2012
