Sunday, May 4, 2008
Global Warming: Cycles and Epicycles.
The title of the New York Times report on the recent study forecasting a spell of mild global cooling sounds a little too eager to prevent reality from getting off message: In a New Climate Model, Short-Term Cooling in a Warmer World. In any case, the report in the Telegraph (UK), entitled simply Global warming may 'stop', scientists predict, is perhaps a bit more balanced:
The average temperature of the sea around Europe and North America is expected to cool slightly over the decade while the tropical Pacific remains unchanged.
This would mean that the 0.3°C global average temperature rise which has been predicted for the next decade by the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change may not happen, according to the paper published in the scientific journal Nature.
The model that the study uses attempts to include the effect of ocean-current cycles in the Pacific and the North Atlantic. It does suggest that the cycles will progress in such a way that warming will resume around 2015. That sounds perfectly plausible. I ran across the idea in mid-1970s that the regional manifestations of the Greenhouse Effect would be very variable, and that in some places there might be regional cooling. That is not quite what the study here is saying: the cooling effect is not conceived to be anthropogenic. Still, it makes sense that a climate model for a real planet would include arbitrary complexities that a model based on an ideal terrarium would not. These complexities would have to be discovered, like irregularities in a landscape.
That said, though, it will be hard to escape the suspicion that all this refinement is very like what medieval astronomers did when they added epicycles to Ptolemy's model of planetary orbits. As a matter of politics, what global warming had in its favor was a flurry of very warm years in the 1980s and 1990s. Now it could become like the Emperor's New Clothes, invisible to all but the virtuous.
This issue is becoming awkward on several levels.
* * *
What's the matter with journalism?
If you believe Hugh Hewitt, the matter is this:
HH: What's driving me crazy about this, Mark Steyn, is that my lawyering
past and present come to play, and people aren't asking the obvious
questions you would ask of any witness in any deposition about the
relationship between Wright and Obama. Okay, let's go back to first steps.
How often did you go to Church, how often did you see each other, did you
travel together to the Million Man March, and that sort of accumulation of
details by which the relationship can be judged. And the media, Tim Russert
probably won't ask even that basic question, did you see each other at the
Million Man March. And it's maddening.
I have never done trial work, but I am a member of my state bar, and I have sometimes brought a lawyer's attitude to bear in my role as a journalist. It never worked. Journalists are supposed to find out the facts of the matter; lawyers are supposed to make a case. I have never yet done a successful interview in which I came prepared with a thesis and asked the interview-subject questions designed to support it.
There have always been journalists with an ax to grind, but one of the deformations of public life in recent decades has been the spread of this attitude to the nonprofit sector. "Advocacy research" organizations are useful, in their way, but they take up too much public space.
As for me, aside from my website, I am now a pure legal editor, at American Lawyer Media. I spend most of the day correcting footnotes. It's wonderful.
