On Climate Change: Politics and Science

Some facts that aren’t generally disputed by anyone:

1. Out of the 33°C of total warming attributed to the greenhouse effect, most if not all of it is desirable; without it we’d be an ice planet.
2. Out of the 33°C of total warming attributed to the greenhouse effect, 60-90+% is caused by water vapor, the third most common gas in our atmosphere.
3. Although cloud cover plays a major role in determining temperatures, we don’t yet understand how. The climate models currently predicting warming don’t model clouds at all yet.

The part that disturbs me about the current state of the science vis-a-vis the politics of climate change is that in spite of the fact that we are obviously before all else a water planet and it is agreed that water plays the largest role in greenhouse theory, hydrology studies are getting the short end of the stick and thus the science lags years behind the CO2 science.

So does the role of land use. For instance, think about the jillion square miles of asphalt we’ve laid down over the last hundred years worldwide. We can see the evidence of this warming every night on TV weather maps with cities always warmer than the surrounding countryside. Yet the phenomenon is largely ignored by a scientific community paid to focus almost exclusively on carbon dioxide.

Why is this? I posit that it is because government paymasters would have a far harder time arguing that they should take over every aspect of world economic output in an effort to control the Earth’s humidity. And land use? Sorry, but a scientific mandate to paint our roadways and rooftops with a radiative barrier is hardly the same as the worldwide control of the power of fire. And hey, we all know that the customer is always right.

I think we need to get government out of the science business.