Moving water at Sydney Uni

I have been wanting to write a blog post on this topic for a while as it sometimes baffles me how people can believe that the actions of humans would have no impact on climate or the environment. Senator Fielding’s recent scepticism of the global warming debate also falls in this category. Let me explain.

If I analyse the comments of people who doubt that humans might be affecting the climate and causing climate change, or whether, more general, humans have any negative impact on the natural environment, I think they are great positivists. Every time I read comments on blogs or in newspaper columns the same mantra seems to come out. Here are the three main points that I think they might believe in:

1. Nature is fantastically self-restoring; it is an ecosystem at optimal functionality. This means that any impact that we might have tends to be local and gets immediately absorbed by the effectiveness of the ecosystem to absorb shocks. For example if we clear cut an area of forest, than its impact on soil, water and atmosphere is either minimal (but this only works if the area is not too large), or the ecosystem compensates this loss of functionality somewhere else. I find this difficult to believe, but it would be wonderful if true.
So as a result of this wonderful resilience of nature none (or few) of the actions of humans have any impact on the overall health of the ecosystem. As a result climate change is not induced by humans, as we can’t have that much impact on the climate

2. Alternatively, I think they have a great trust in human inventiveness and in the certainty of science: We will find solutions for all our problems. Don’t worry about climate change, even if this is happening it is not a problem. We have very smart scientists and we humans are fantastically inventive. As a result, whatever climate change is happening is not an issue, we can easily manage those problems. Don’t be so alarmist, of course we can deal with 1 – 2 C increase in temperature. Our science is advanced and we have already have lots if solutions like clean coal technology and cloud seeding. Another example: currently the temperature trends since 1998 do not agree at all with the predictions of climate change, so the science of climate change must be wrong. This suggests that they believe that all predictions in science must generally be very certain (even though they can be wrong). In other words, most scientific predictions are very accurate and predict exactly what is going to happen, ergo, if it does not exactly predict what is going to happen it must be wrong.

Particularly this last point baffles me, to me all science comes with considerable uncertainty (even the best predictions contain uncertainty). Forecasting the future is the worst, there are so many variables. However with the best available science we can make a general prediction of the future (plus or minus “a bit”). So you would never expect reality to exactly follow a prediction, you would expect it to follow a general (and in this case long term) trend.

I also do not understand the high trust in nature’s resilience. That is some wonderful system that we have, but surely everything can be broken. For a system to be highly resilient it needs to be highly interconnected. In addition, most highly resilient systems still have breaking point, and once it breaks there is no way back as the most resilient systems are also the most hysteretic.

Of course, I should post something like this without also pointing out what I believe in, however, I will keep you in suspense for a week. I promise to post next week my views on Nature, science and the universe.