Tossing Mullet

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I know it was cold last week and it’s likely to get cold next week – maybe even colder. Everytime a front comes through, half a dozen people challenge sermons on climate change.

Almost everyone has heard it is a very complex issue, but very few can really comprehend just how complicated and it is even tougher because of the things that we are and have been uncertain about. This uncertainty has long been used to justify calls by the administration for – “more studies!”, “more data”! Even so the vocal minority keep insisting that the Bush administration doesn’t support scientific inquiry!

Twenty years ago I facilitated a meeting on the impacts of climate change on coastal areas – ironically held in New Orleans. I left with very few certainties in my mind. The first and most impressive was the clear sense that the climate modelers were a long, long, long way from any confidence in their own models and predictive ability.

They did seem to largely agree that warming seemed more likely than cooling, even though there was some support for that occurrence as well. Quite candidly, they didn’t seem to have a clue and my flagging confidence in models and modelers was further bolstered.

The New Orleans administrator who spoke at lunch was clearly more worried about crime and teenage pregnancies than he was about something that might happen in 50 years. He pointedly noted that politicians used a 4-year planning horizon, at best. The only real long term resource planning seems to exist in the areas of silviculture and major water resource management.

This is simply because the trees take quite a while to mature to harvestable size and projects like dams and other water management structures take even longer to fund and build. So it is easy to understand that concerns about sea level rise and uncertain storm cycles in the next century were not likely to capture the bureaucrat’s attention.

There were a couple of things about which they were sort of certain. The models all seemed to agree on one factor – the variability around a rising average temperature was going to increase markedly. This unpleasant relative certainty gave me a great deal of food for thought. That projection translates into colder cold fronts inside somewhat warmer winters and hotter summers!

I live down here because I don’t really like cold and snow except for short excursions with skiing possibilities. It also implies hotter summers which are already quite hot enough for almost everyone – not a pretty picture!

The implications of hotter climates did evoke serious discussions at the conference about enhanced tropical storm activity. Longer seasons and therefore at least more storms seemed to be likely. Having recently survived Hurricane Frederic in 1979, I was somewhat less than happy returning from the conference. Great! Hotter summers, more storms, and even colder at times during the winter! The only thing good about all this was the level of uncertainty still associated with all of it.

They conferees also touched on their inability to relate climate warming to the issue of bigger or more damaging storms. That particular factor remains a topic of hot debate within meteorologists and climate change experts. The longer season and increased tropical activity is no longer debated by anybody. The problem with enlarged storms is the argument that there are physical and meteorological factors that have greater effects on the size of the storms than just the temperature. Many of us in the marine science community have been intrigued with the relationship to the deep water temperatures, which do represent an energy reservoir for the storms passing over them.

For those that want to learn more than they thought they had time for, I really recommend a very readable book by a science writer, John Cox. He was a Knight Science Journalism Fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology during the mid-’90s and he studied earth science while there. His book, “Climate Crash,” pulls together the various sources of scientific support for the concept.

The book was disturbing in the way that it was intended. A large part of the scientific community (including yours truly) had already accepted global warming as a fact regardless of the causes and our role in it. But we labored under the happy thought that it was going to take quite a long time and most natural systems would probably adapt over time and the shift would be functionally painless.

Who cares if oranges come from Pennsylvania or Florida – more rooms for senior citizens to retire in air-conditioned comfort and storm resistant condos! But Cox and his cast of scientific characters demonstrate the speed with which climate has actually changed in the past – tens of years, not thousands.

Several years ago a researcher from the University of Wisconsin visited the Dauphin Island Sea Lab to present the results of his research on the onset and thickness of Great Lakes ice. This is the kind of data that Cox used in his book, but it was fun to hear it from “the man.”

Dr. Warren Magnuson was indeed a classic and stereotypical scientist who did not spin his data in an exaggerated manner. His intent was to inform, not create hysteria or even concern other than the appreciation of the validity and robustness of his data. Quite appropriately he did revisit the 20-year old issues associated with the uncertain consequences of climate change and global warming.

He was properly conscious of the caution inevitably associated with scientists dabbling in areas worthy of public concern. After all, the best that a scientist will ever go is 95 percent certainty, never 100 percent, unless you are dealing with a natural law and even those are continually poked and prodded by the hard core scientific community.

Speaking specifically to the issue of his confidence in serious consequences to climate change, he uttered a phrase that could go down in the annals of scientific understatement and obfuscation – “The uncertainties have diminished!”

It occurred to me you could not possibly have a better statement on your headstone.

George Crozier is Lagniappe columnist. Contact him at george@lagniappemobile.com.

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