With the help of President Obama, a deal was cut in Copenhagen. The proposal aims to guarantee that the average Earth temperature does not increase by 2 degrees over the next century. Paint me as an anti-scientific libertarian if you choose, but I remain agnostic on the existence of anthropogenic global warming. I believe that the issue of weather and climate remains a field that is insufficiently understood--actually, virtually impossible to understand and predict. It is not dissimilar to attempts to predict economic forecasts with certainty or explain economic outcomes and historical occurrences with crystal clear ex-post-facto stories; there are simply too many variables to capture in the models. Even though a decrease in supply, when all else remains constant, leads to an increase in price, all else never remains constant. The same is true for understanding and predicting changes in the climate. Though not a physicist or a climatologist, I understand that emissions of CO2, methane, and water vapor can have a greenhouse effect and, all else remaining constant, lead to an increase in air and surface temperature. The problem is that all else does not remain constant. There are literally trillions of other climatic phenomena occurring that have an impact on global climate. Does this mean that we know nothing about these climatic phenomena? No, but it does mean that before we institute, in one form or another, an extreme global carbon tax, we should understand that the climate scientists who speak with certainty are dealing with a subject that is incomprehensibly complex.
I am not denying that anthropogenic global warming is possible; I am merely saying that it is essentially impossible, at least with modern scientific methods, to determine whether anthropogenic warming is occurring today, and anybody who gives me a specific number that they are sure the Earth will warm over the next x-amount of years is demonstrating hubris in the extreme. If we want to cut greenhouse gas emissions as a precautionary measure for the possibility that AGW is real and devastating as we are told to believe, then lets have this debate. This is not how this subject is portrayed, nor was this the tenor of the Copenhagen Climate Summit. Skepticism in science is a good thing, and before we surrender to a world government that has the power to monitor energy consumption on an individual level, I think we should have an honest debate.
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It seems that to the extent there is a rational criticism of the "climate change" "science," it amounts to an allegation that there are limits to objective scientific inquiry. Because human activity is itself part of the vast, dynamic, multi-variate system that is the global ecosystem, it is impossible to formulate a comprehensive, 4D understanding of the ecosystem without encountering an enormous Heisenberg problem. Of course, one seemingly "rational" way to deal with this is to adopt a static set of normative assumptions about how it "should" operate (a technique that works in many closed-end scientific inquiries). Unlike closed-end inquiries, however, any set of assumptions that, perforce, call into question the continuing existence of the observer making them will have one or more that reflect the personal and/or philosophical and/or political biases of that observer. This is where the "environmentalists" leave themselves open to attack. Of course, those on the opposite end of the spectrum don't have this problem, because they are not in the position of calling for a radical departure from centuries of established human behavior. To the extent that they have any data that seems to show that climate fluctuations may pre-date or otherwise be independent of human industrial activity, they can sit back and claim that their antagonists are subjectively grafting their personal assumptions onto data about which it is impossible to objectively theorize. Those who exalt scientific method as the means of knowing everything and anything about the natural world will admit of nothing that questions that fundamental dogma. On the other hand, if they just happen to be right, then philosophical debates about the limits of human understanding will be moot!
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