Why the Climate Spoof Worked

November 13, 2007

Well, that was fun.

A British writer whipped up a plausible-looking scientific paper that attributed global warming to a mass of oceanic algae spewing vast quantities of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

The dummy paper, published in a dummy scientific journal, caught the eye of the intrepid band of "skeptics" who cannot bear the thought that human activities are changing the climate. Bloggers went into overdrive. Web sites sizzled. Talk radio jocks cranked up the volume. Here, at last, was definitive proof that would debunk all those neurotic scientists and enable mankind to continue gorging blissfully on non-renewable fossil fuels.

After a short time, a number of the prominent skeptics, to their credit, realized that they had been had. Enviros chortled at the April Fool-like spoof. And a good time was had by all.

There's a lesson in this humorous episode that is worth pondering, however. It can be blasted difficult sometimes to make clear to lay people the reasons why alternative global warming explanations that are regularly trotted out by skeptics don't work. The climate's workings, driven as they are by various forcing mechanisms, feedback loops, and differing time and space scales, make simplified explanations hard work. As Henry David Thoreau was purported to have said, it takes a long time to make a story short.

The complexity begs questions, not only from skeptics, but from those on the fence who are genuinely puzzled.

A couple of examples. A common observation is that throughout earth history, warming cycles have come and gone for perfectly natural reasons, long before coal plants and gas guzzlers were invented. Why is today different?

Another common question is that if meteorologists can't forecast the weather more than a few days out, how can fancy-pants climatologists make predictions about what the climate will be like decades in the future?

The seemingly reasonable premises of such questions illustrate the appeal of a spoof paper with a seemingly reasonable theory that was actually nonsense.

Of course, there are answers to the questions about past warming episodes and forecasting. It is a fallacy of logic to state that because natural causes explain global warming in past epochs, natural causes, ipso facto, explain today's warming. Circumstances have changed, and try as they might, scientists have not found evidence that would tie the current bout of warming to natural explanations, such as increased solar output. The evidence, instead, points to greenhouse gases emitted by fossil fuel combustion since the mid-19th century.

Likewise, climate and weather are related phenomena, but have important differences. An important distinction is that they operate at different time scales. Weather takes place in the short term, when many chaotic variables make it nigh impossible to make an accurate forecast beyond a week. Climate operates in the long term, when variables tend to smooth out and trends can be discerned. You can't predict precisely what the high temperature will be in Phoenix on the next Fourth of July, but you can safely say that it will be higher than the high in Minneapolis on New Year's Day.

While scientists have learned much about the impacts of human activities on the climate, they will never yield answers precise or definitive enough to satisfy the skeptics, even assuming the skeptics wish to be satisfied. Science is an ongoing process. It's up to the rest of us -- government leaders, business executives, civil society, and ordinary citizens -- to make a reasoned judgment as to when the volume and quality of scientific information about climate change warrants action.

Think of it this way: If nine out of 10 mechanics tell you that your car needs a brake job, do you listen to the nine and get the work done, or do you listen to the one outlier, strap your kid into the car, and head for the mountains? What would you do?