31 May 2010

Andrew Marr Summarizes the Climate Debate in Two Paragraphs

From this weekend's FT:

Global warming is dangerously overheated. To the bemused onlooker, it seems to be a branch of predictive science dominated by empurpled men bellowing at one another. Self-righteous doomsters lick their lips as they list the horrors rushing towards us as a direct result of our greed and selfishness. Self-righteous “sceptics” pounce on mistakes by scientists to denounce the whole man-made global warming thesis as a leftish, hairshirt-wearers’ plot.

There is no escape from the shouting. However meticulous the science, prediction is only prediction. As Ian McEwan recently reminded us in his novel Solar, climate science is as riven by ego, jealousy, mixed motives and exaggeration as any other branch of human thought. The range of possible outcomes seems confusingly wide.