Science and Politics

This year I am taking a class called applied climatology. It is mainly about how we can use climatology in a practical manner. As such, we spend quite a bit of time talking about climate change, in fact all of our lectures are about Anthropogenic Global Warming or AGW. AGW is what we scientists call human induced climate change.

Now I have a fairly different opinion of climate change than most people. I am of the thought that we do indeed effect the climate, and it is for sure changing, however whether or not we need or even should change the way we act just to try and reverse climate change is a huge grey area in my mind. Most people in general have an opinion one way or another, I am of the school of thought that we still do not know enough to make a true decision.

This raises one of my favorite part of science, policy. As a scientist, I am required to find only the facts, it is not up to me to create policy, only to share the facts. It is up to us to leave policy and discussions up to the law makers. unfortunately politicians dont understand science too well and often take what we say out of context.

An example of that is the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)'s reports. They are comprised of 100's of pages of very scientific writing that even the most dedicated of climatologists can find dry and boring. They however also contain a piece developed specifically for policy makers and the press. This piece is so important that it is gone over line by line and sometimes word by word to ensure that all of the parties involved agree with what it is saying. However, like any piece of writing, if one line is taken out of context it is very easy to make it sound like something is very different that it truly is. This is the part of climate change science that is my favorite.

Another argument against climate science is that if we cant predict the weather out to 5 days, how can we predict it out to 100 years. The problem with this view is that we dont use meteorological models to predict climate, we use their cousins, climate models, which are use much different inputs than our meteorological models. This is because they were created specifically to predict climate, and we believe that they do pretty okay (admittedly they have problems, we know that and are working to make them more accurate, it will take time and money to make it happen however).

Sifting through all of the bad science and trying to find the nuggets of truth hidden in there, listening to politicians make fools of themselves defending something that is physically impossible and can be proven as such. This is the part of climate that I can get into. 

On a related note, I am a (student) meteorologist, I predict weather. I am literally trying to tell you what will happen in the future. If you want to complain that I am not accurate enough or that I can not tell the weather a month out, I will just stop. You will be stuck not knowing what the hell will happen tomorrow and whether or not you need a jacket. So lay off the criticism and just be happy that we live in a society where you can be pretty sure of what the future holds for the next two or three days (at least as far as the weather goes).