theaustralian.news.com.au
That's an interesting article. While I am very concerned about environmental degradation, especially habitat destruction and the resulting elimination of species, I am still agnostic on global warming, or what they now call "climate change". I accept the basic premise that CO2 is a greenhouse gas, and I think it is quite possible that the elevated CO2 levels from burning fossil fuels will elevate global temperature, but I don't believe that this has been established conclusively. Since I am a mathematical modeller (albeit operating at a much simpler level than the climate modellers) I am quite skeptical about numerical models. The global climate system is incredibly complex, with physical and chemical interactions between land, oceans and atmosphere, then there is the variability of the sun's output ... many aspects of the basic science are not well understood, for example I'm not aware of any reliable models of cloud dynamics. Even if the basic science were well characterized, the modelling task would still be enormously difficult. It's worth remembering that "chaos theory" was kicked off by a climate modeller, and the chaotic system that he discovered was actually very simple - only three differential equations.
Also, there is a lot of stupid and irresponsible material published in the media. For example, many people seem to think that as the earth gets hotter everywhere will turn into a desert. This is precisely wrong. Higher temperatures mean higher levels of total rainfall, because of the increased evaporation rate. Of course, some places will probably get drier, but that just means some will get even wetter than they otherwise would have. Also the idea that global food production will crash is silly. OK, there will be adjustments, and temporary losses in production as some regions become less well-suited to agriculture. But overall higher temperatures, more water and more CO2 are all good for plants. |
