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Global Warming - Have you made up your mind yet?

Certainty, probability, possibility or conjecture? You must decide, says Ivor Williams

The time is coming when you will have to make up your mind about global warming. The reason is that we humans are burning fossil fuels, putting gases into the atmosphere and thereby upsetting the Earth’s normal heat balance. Carbon dioxide and other so-called ‘greenhouse’ gases act as a kind of blanket; temperatures seem to be rising very slowly, which agrees with the theories.

Do you believe global warming is a threat? If so, are you serious about cutting down your share of carbon dioxide? For instance, by taking holidays in Torquay or Ilfracombe instead of Chiang Mai or Cancun? By cycling to work? By eating nothing grown outside the UK? It’s that kind of action that may be needed, not switching off the piddling little stand-by light on your television (although it all helps). You may be convinced by the climatologists, but do you think anything we can do will make much difference – when China, we are told, is apparently commissioning a coal-fired power-station every week? Their argument is sound: we have huge stocks of coal, they say; our people need electricity; and the Western World (especially the UK) burned coal for 200 years, so why shouldn’t we?

Or perhaps you still have lingering doubts because you remember experts telling us about the opposite kind of disaster? In 1982 a United Nations conference heard that dealing with the approaching ice age might mean dropping coal dust over the polar ice sheets to absorb radiation. It is apparent that 25 years later there is still room for alternative theories. Experts frequently break into the media to tell us it’s the sun, or that climate is always changing, or there are more important things to worry about, or it’s all hyped up to get money for climate research and the green parties.

So you may be confused. Is it the media’s fault? Who is to blame for the conflicting opinions? The media are noted for their attention-grabbing headlines (though not this respectable magazine, of course). The way our opinions are formed is largely by way of TV and the newspapers; these outlets will seize on any new climatic theory and make a meal of it, regardless of the careful scientific note of caution that may appear in the press release.

It is therefore left to us to decide what to believe, without being given any clue as to whether the latest worrying paragraphs about the future state of the Earth are a certainty, a probability, a possibility, or a conjecture. Presumably we must take the blame for being confused, sceptical or apathetic. But selective quotation is the media’s way to success, so everything is thrown at us without the vital detail that would fix the headline data in its proper place on that important scale from certainty to conjecture. You need a good grounding in science subjects, plus time to read carefully what the Met Office’s climate unit at the Hadley Centre is putting out, before you would be able to take a view on the situation. Not many people have either the knowledge or the time to do that, yet we will all be called on to play our part in whatever the government of the day thinks right.

Because there is so much thoughtlessly printed and carelessly broadcast about the subject, the information has itself become a huge obstacle to understanding among those not scientifically astute enough to know their probabilities from their conjectures. We surely need to find an answer to this problem, which could in the next few years (in our democratic society) be at least as important as global warming itself. Governments who try to put through painful measures can easily fall. The kinds of action that might eventually be necessary to reduce the threat of global warming will quite definitely be unpopular. We have had a glimpse of what might be in store from the 600-page Stern report published last October. Votes are easily lost when a comfortable way of life is threatened.

The main problem with global warming, as I’ve said before, is that we do not at the moment know for certain what might happen; but we cannot afford not to take some worldwide action very soon, because if our climatologists are right then our Earth is in for a very rough time.

You may have to decide soon what you think about global warming. Are you ready?

Some of this is based on an article by the author which appeared in the October 2006 issue of Weather, the journal of the Royal Meteorological Society.

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