fire, brimstone, and global warming

i have a confession to make. i have not seen "an inconvenient truth," and i probably never will. if you think this means i shouldn’t critique the film, rest assured that all evidence presented is on the internet, and that i have seen it.

i refuse to go because i don't like propaganda films, even if packaged and sold by the manifestation of bland that is al gore. i say propaganda because i think the chances of finding objective truth in a movie theatre are about the same as finding a fortune cookie that actually forecasts my life.

speaking of forecasts, i should get down to what this article is really about: global warming.

and intelligent design.

what does global warming have to do with i.d.? well, it depends on what you mean by "global warming." if we take it to mean that the earth's average temperature has risen as of late, and nothing more, then global warming and i.d. have very little to do with each other. but that simple definition of global warming is like the part of intelligent design that says, "look, there are humans!" -- no real controversy, there.

what ties global warming to intelligent design is the way we fill in the gaps.

nietzsche said it best: "nature has installed man in the midst of illusion." somewhat counter-intuitively, this is not a statement about the world around us. rather, his brilliant observation is that the human mind imposes order upon its surroundings -- even when there is none.

and order is just a hop, skip, and a jump from intelligence.

consider the snowflake. each is unique, a variation on a theme whose exquisite structure might lead us to believe that every flake is hand-crafted by the likes of jack frost. but we know better. random gusts of wind interact with water's molecular geometry to render crystalline structures in unmistakable – and beautiful – hexagonal patterns.

characters like jack frost are omnipresent in human history. this is because we have a strong tendency towards anthropomorphism, the attribution of human characteristics to non-human phenomena. and such bias makes sense, but only as a cognitive convenience. it took hundreds of years of experimentation and deduction before we could say anything about snowflakes. in the meantime, how much easier was it to just chalk them up to some deity or mythical character?

but here's why it’s really great; we innately know how to influence human behavior, making personification even easier when the phenomenon is frightening -- when we desperately want to change it.

anthropomorphism is what lies behind ancient rituals of sacrifice. early humans thought that their local volcano erupted because it was "angry," and so concluded that a gift would calm it down.

now, let's tie this all together, with a little help from our friend, math. for the sake of argument, we’ll assume the worst-case temperature reconstruction (the infamous “hockey stick”).

what you have to remember is that whenever someone makes a claim about atmospheric cause-and-effect, it is supported only by their model of how the atmosphere works.

the problem is that our atmosphere is what is called a "nonlinear, dynamical system." this is a fancy way of saying that its features -- temperature, humidity, cloud cover, etc. -- do not follow neat lines and curves, and they are subject to wild fluctuations, putting it in the same class of systems as the stock market. both are breathtakingly complex and have thousands or millions of influences (variables, in mathspeak).

these systems can barely be captured by today's greatest mathematicians and our most powerful supercomputers, much less by al gore.

in closing, i’d like to address one last point and remind everyone that government funding does not put research on the moral high ground. nazi-era eugenics arose without any sort of governmental directive. german scientists simply knew that they could get easy money if their research was in line with popular opinion. how popular? so much so that its supporters included theodore roosevelt, woodrow wilson, winston churchill, oliver wendell holmes, louis brandeis, alexander graham bell, leland stanford, h. g. wells, george bernard shaw, the carnegie and rockefeller foundations, the cold springs harbor institute, and researchers at harvard, yale, princeton, stanford and johns hopkins. even some nobel prize-winners lent their support.

now, all of this is not to say that humans should be definitively ruled out as global warming's root cause. we could very well be exactly that. the point is that we should take it all with a grain of salt and not rely on anecdotal evidence (another nasty human tendency). we should be focus our efforts on saving the world from more definite threats, like war, death, near-earth objects, and supervolcanoes.

let’s not lose our heads just because it's easiest to blame ourselves.