Despite congressional Republicans’ attempts to reign in the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, greenhouse gas restrictions for large power plants and other industrial sectors are currently being cast. And so U.S. industries will continue to be shackled by bureaucratic chains forged with links that ostensibly connect humans to climate change.
But before any more economy-crushing global-warming regulations are mandated, someone needs to plainly state the obvious. So here it goes:
No one person or group of people, no matter how smart individually or collectively, no matter how powerful and complex their computer models, no matter their credentials or worldly authority … no one can predict long-term global climate change with any degree of certainty worth risking humanity’s future.
To be sure, many have and will claim they can, but when it comes right down to it, nobody really knows what will happen with our complicated climate system in the distant future. Nobody.
The fact that no one really knows the atmospheric future comes as no surprise to meteorologists, of course. Any of us who has devoted any length of time to forecasting understands that humility is imposed very quickly. And the farther out the forecast, the more vanishing the vainglory.
My general rule of thumb for reliance on forecast accuracy is 72 hours for most areas of the U.S. Ultimately, according to chaos theory, the limit to forecasting time is about 14 days. Three days to two weeks, that’s it. Beyond a couple of weeks, you might as well flip a coin.
The typical retort is that climate and weather are different. But don’t let this red herring fool you. It could easily be argued that providing an outlook for climate conditions the world over and decades in advance is an order of magnitude more difficult and chancy than predicting Wednesday’s weather in Washington on Monday morning.
Yet the counterargument would be that climate outlooks do not need to be as specific as mundane weather forecasts. True, pinpoint accuracy is not necessary for climate forecasting.
However, even in sweeping terms of time and space, the chance of successfully predicting the overall temperature within a narrow range in the tropics or at the poles several decades from now is practically a draw.
Too many climate variables are insufficiently known or unaccounted for, such as water in all its forms — as vapor in the air, droplets and crystals in clouds, and polar ice — or future solar activity, which is expected to remain low for quite some time (but who knows?).
A terrific example of the state of climate forecasting is the official U.S. prediction for the hurricane season of 2006. That May, immediately preceding the onset of the Atlantic hurricane season, the top government hurricane forecasters couldn’t accurately predict even the total number of severe storms.
The prognostication was for another season of unusually numerous events (although not expected to equal the record-breaking 31 events of 2005, including its 15 hurricanes).
But the forecast was a bust, with only 10 named storms recorded (five hurricanes and five tropical storms); the average is closer to at least 15 storms. So much for forecasting climatic conditions better than the weekend’s weather.
In the final analysis, perhaps the best solution is for meteorologists of the world to unite and urge that realism and humility return to our sister science. Otherwise, the world may experience a real catastrophe — less liberty and more poverty, regardless of what the climate decides to do.
Anthony J. Sadar is a certified consulting meteorologist specializing in air-quality issues and primary author of “Environmental Risk Communication: Principles and Practices for Industry” (CRC Press/Lewis Publishers, 2000).
