Thank you to my colleague Todd Whitcombe for explaining the difference between weather and climate (Wacky Weather and a Crazy Climate, July 26). It is an improvement over those who use anecdotal evidence of extreme weather as proof of a climate catastrophe.
I trust Dr. Whitcombe's science and that of those who carefully gather evidence of global warming, but based on past experience I have less trust in the predictions of human catastrophes arising from it. In the five-plus decades of my life, I have heard many predictions of environmental collapse. They began from real science but the human effects were regularly exaggerated.
When you see a long series of predictions of catastrophe due to human sins (start with Thomas Malthus, or perhaps better, the Bible), and when the errors of prediction have almost always skewed in the same direction, then you have evidence of a trend. Science tells us that when we see a consistent trend, we may look for a cause.
I have come to believe that there is something in our shared culture that predisposes us to believe that the world is going to - well, somewhere hotter.
It appears to be a trend that belongs to our culture. It is our culture of inherited ideas that makes us so afraid. But perhaps the environmental worriers are right this time. Maybe this time we really are doomed unless we all change our sinful ways very soon. Yet I'm not so sure. I'd be more confident if they could explain their track record. To do so, they'll need a little more critical distance from our culture's constructions and its inherited beliefs.
Maybe warmth will just turn out to be warmth, just as bad weather is sometimes just bad weather. There will be real problems but we'll deal with those that turn out to be real. I don't know for sure that my more worried friends are wrong, but I'm also not as sure as they are that they're right. Maybe it's just our culture's way of thinking that makes us worry so.
Dr. Boris DeWiel,
UNBC
Prince George
