Arguably the biggest complaints skeptics have about climate change advocates are that 1) they frequently make predictions that are wrong, 2) they engage in extremely specious reasoning when called to account for why those predictions were wrong, and 3) they carry on making silly predictions as if their credibility had not been damaged.
You don’t have to be a climate change skeptic to be annoyed by this constant moving of the goal posts. Well, Steve Milloy of JunkScience.com flags this op-ed in today’s New York Times as possibly “the dumbest thing ever written on climate.” The argument being put forth by the op-ed is, get this, global warming is destroying our ability to predict the future:
Now to be fair, the argument being put forth is that agriculture, meteorology, and many other bodies of knowledge rely upon using data about past weather patterns to plan for the future, and global warming is making weather patterns harder to predict. If we can’t predict weather patterns in a broad sense, it will have all sorts of negative ramifications.
However, much of the technology behind global climate models we’re using is very recent. And those cutting-edge climate models have often proven unreliable, to the point where “global warming” was re-branded “climate change” because there appeared to be no increase in global temperatures for nearly the last two decades. Or at least that was the case until recently, when scientists started using a different data set and resumed their claims that global warming was proceeding apace. (Again, this is a change which, ironically, doesn’t suggest that climate models are reliable.)
In any event, I must disagree with Milloy about one thing. If climate change advocates can make the argument that the difficulty of predicting weather patterns only further proves the reality of climate change and make it stick, well, then the argument is far from dumb. It may prove to be another way for climate change advocates to ingeniously inoculate themselves against criticism.
But as someone who is perfectly open to the possibility that climate change is real, I have to say this NYT op-ed is a near crystalline example of the transparently illogical and circuitous rhetoric that climate change skeptics justifiably complain about.
