The Ocean Is Cooling

Global warming “scientists” are not necessarily wrong to suggest that large-scale industrialization is affecting climate patterns. They are guilty, though, of jumping to dramatic conclusions based on insufficient supporting data. It turns out that global weather and climate patterns are extraordinarily complex things. For instance, it’s a huge poke in the eye to traditional global warming doctrine that the oceans – bigger heat sinks than continents are heat producers – seem to be getting cooler, not warmer.

The academic and scientific discipline of studying the environment is about a quarter-century old. No one should be surprised that those who first venture into this territory wind up making pronouncements that turn out to be as wrong-headed as Lamarck was about evolution or Ptolemy was about astronomy.

Nor should we be particularly surprised when those initial, dramatic pronouncements in a new field of learning quickly become enshrined as immutable truths – which is what happened to Lamarck and Ptolemy’s ideas; geocentrism prevailed for as long as it did in part due to the power of the initial vision of the geocentric universe and in part due to governmental/religious suppression of the heliocentric model (which ultimately turned out to be more correct). Lamarckian evolution (evolution by way of acquired characteristics) did not really leave the sphere of respectable scientific thought until the 1950’s when genetic science moved forward and natural selection returned to the forefront of biology.

Why should climatology be any different than any other field of human learning with respect to having to shed some initially appealing but ultimately disproven hypotheses? That’s how science works, after all.

Compounding the problem in the case of global warming is that the science of climate analysis has always been alloyed with substantial amounts of political advocacy. Global warming political activists (whether they are scientists or not) are hoping that good public policy can be based upon the foundation of this new area of scientific investigation, at least some of the conclusions of which are going to turn out to be incorrect. There is a chance they are right – but we should expect the ratio of ideas that turn out to be good versus those that turn out to be (at best) wastes of time and money to be no better than that which chance would have us expect.

We can’t and shouldn’t say “that there is no such thing as global warming.” But even if we credit them with the utmost of god faith and good intentions, global climatologists are still pioneers in a brand-new field – and that means they’re going to get stuff wrong from time to time, sometimes even with big things. Moreover, the kinds of policies global warming alarmists propose might be good for other reasons, too – for instance, encouraging people to drive high-mileage, low-emission cars may or may not help prevent global warming, but it will likely also make the air we breathe healthier and extend the utility of the vehicles we drive.

Now, it’s not particularly expensive for society to dispense with a scientific hypothesis that turns out to have a serious inadequacy. But it is often quite expensive for society to dispense with a public policy that after a few years doesn’t work out quite as intended. Which is why we should be cautious implementing policies based upon brand-new science.

I’m not saying we should ignore climatologists or their calls for stronger environmental protection policies. What I’m saying is that mixing science with doctrine, even when part of a well-intentioned undertaking, produces bad policy and bad science.