Last Christmas, I read Michael Crichton’s latest book State of Fear. It is a techno thriller designed to “out” the politics of global warming. He does a great job of showing how the political and media elite manipulate the public fears of a looming climate crisis so as to maintain control of the public agenda.

As a postscript, Crichton states: “I am certain there is too much certainty in the world.”[1]

His basic thesis is that we simply do not know enough about our very complex environment to be making claims to certain knowledge. We most certainly do not know enough to implement far reaching policies to control global warming.

These policies will likely have the impact of preserving the West’s hegemony over industrial development at the expense of third world economies. Well intentioned quotas on greenhouse gas emissions can only serve to freeze the state of the world economies, leaving the poor still poor and the rich still rich.

Crichton’s conclusions were confirmed for me when the following press release was carried by the major news wires on February 17^th, 2005. This release came out the DAY AFTER (sic the movie) Kofi Annan announced the coming into force the Kyoto treaty against global warming.[2] It came from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography.

The opening paragraph states “Scientists at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California, San Diego, and their colleagues have produced the first clear evidence of human-produced warming in the world's oceans, a finding they say removes much of the uncertainty associated with debates about global warming."[3]

As a result of this press release, the media gave much attention to statements made by Tim Barnett, a research marine physicist in the Climate Research Division at Scripps.  Note Barnett’s claims to certainty

"The debate is no longer whether there is a global warming signal," Tim Barnett, a marine physicist at Scripps Institution of Oceanography who analyzed 9 million ocean-temperature and salinity readings. "The debate is what are we going to do about it."[4]

“The models got it right. If a politician stands up and says the uncertainty is too great to believe these models, that is no longer tenable.”[5]

"The debate over whether or not there is a global warming signal is now over, at least for rational people," he said."[6]

The interesting thing I find about Dr. Barnett’s claims is that they have been made before on the basis of computer models.[7] Other climate scientists have commented on the flaws in that approach[8]

"The response, by Ray Bradley and Mann, may as well have been written here:

We believe that relying on computer models without the validated ability to model century and longer timescale variability...is thoroughly unwise.

And later:

The arguments of Barnett et al. fly in the face of the most basic tenet of natural science, whereby the real-world truth must always be the target for our theoretical models.

And finally:

Models are useful tools to understand the complexities of past and future climate variations, but they are no substitute for reality.

No substitute for reality!

This is the reality check we need in our thinking. Just because we say something is real does not make it real no matter how much we believe it to be real. Models are models. Reality is reality.

How does one achieve certainty with models? Only by testing the hypothesis over many years. Thus Crichton states in his postscript “Before making expensive policy decisions on the basis of climate models, I think it is reasonable to require that these models predict future temperatures accurately for a period of ten years. Twenty would be better.”[9]

I agree with Crichton’s conclusion in his book. If you would like to take a journey of discovery into insight, paradigm shifts and the myths of global warming, it is a good quick read.