not with a bang, but a whimper
....................................................................................................................................................................
What does the future hold for the climate change debate? Will there ever come a day when we see the headlines across the globe, ‘It’s Official – There Is No Climate Change Crisis’? Hardly – for unless we find some way to leap ahead in the currently highly immature science of climate change and manage finally to pin down the exact direct and indirect (via feedbacks) warming effect of adding greenhouse gases to our atmosphere and the exact effects of natural changes in our climate the outcomes will remain uncertain. The eminent scientist Stephen Koonin has stated that, ‘Today’s best estimate of the sensitivity [of the atmosphere to the addition of carbon dioxide]… is no different, and no more certain, than it was 30 years ago. And this is despite an heroic research effort costing billions of dollars.’ Basically, unless the ‘Uncertainty Monster’ is slain (and there is absolutely no reason to believe that will happen in the foreseeable future) neither the believers nor the skeptics can ‘prove’ their case. In which case we seem to be in a ‘wait and see’ position. But for how long? Even if the current global warming Slowdown persisted for decades it would still be possible that dramatic and dangerous warming was just about to resume. Indeed in 2015 The UK’s Royal Society expressed the view that it would take 50 years of divergence between the observations and the climate models before they would be convinced that the theory of anthropogenic climate change was flawed. We cannot be absolutely sure that there will be no climate change crisis – only that it is becoming increasingly unlikely. So the politically-correct scientific shibboleths of the ‘climate change crisis’ idea may well persist for a great many decades.
