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Global Warming and the Local Weather
...What is troubling me today though, and here's the connection with religion, is the change in the rhetoric by those who believe global warming is real, human-caused, and that it requires a major change in the way we live. For fun, start a discussion with such a person about the current snowy, cold winter and do make the joke about how it is evidence against global warming. My bet is that their reaction will be something like this: "Oh no, it's evidence in favor. You see it's not about 'warming' per se; it's about 'global climate change.' Thus the fact that some areas are having cold, snowy winters is something that 'global warming' would predict, just as it predicts more and stronger hurricanes and all other kind of things. We should expect a more varied climate."

One smaller observation about this line of argument is that it seems to fit the more general "fear of change" that we see among many on the left and right about all other kinds of issues, mostly economic. The earth's climate has "changed" for billions of years, long before humans walked it. Why would we expect it to stop changing because we're here (and as if "we" as human animals aren't part of the earth's ecology anyway)? And how much hubris does it take for us to think we can stop such change?

We've also seen the human costs of a similar hubris in 20th century "socialism." Why would we expect this to be any different?

But that's not the big problem here. The big problem with the "climate change" hypothesis is a very simple issue of the philosophy of science: is the hypothesis of global climate change/warming falsifiable? A much better question to ask your environmentalist friends is this one:

"What climatological or meteorological evidence would convince you that your belief in global warming is wrong?" (Of course they have the same right to ask this of skeptics - what evidence would convince you that the world is, in fact, warming?)

I've tried this and the reaction varies from indignation at having to answer it, to lots of hemming and hawing about possible answers, to serious and thoughtful replies. The point, however, is that those who assert the truth of the hypothesis of global warming have a scientific obligation to have a legitimate answer to that question. If they do not, or if they reject the idea that they must, they are ruling themselves out of the science business and into the religion business. Global warming becomes the equivalent of "it was God's will." The hypothesis that event X was "God's will" is unfalsifiable and is thus purely a matter of faith. Of course, in our best Seinfeldian voice, we might say "not that there's anything wrong with that." Indeed, faith and religious belief are fine, but they aren't science. (Note to my philosophically-inclined readers: I'm not advocating a full-bore Popperian philosophy of science here. I do, however, believe that falsifiability is a necessary condition for a statement to be considered a scientific hypothesis.) ...