Dear Climate Skeptics,

Climate science is really complicated, partly because of positive and negative feedback effects. Water vapor is one positive feedback effect. There are others, like ice-cap and permafrost albido, ocean conveyor currents, methane release in the arctic, and in the seabed. Global warming gets explained to the public in over-simplified ways, and its easy sport for mildly savvy "debunkers" to poke a few holes in the simplified version.

Be skeptical, that's fine. But it really is true that these climate scientists study all these complexities, and they see real cause for alarm. Scientists are smart. They’re the guys that sent people to the moon and stuff. They haven’t been paid off, the vast majority of them. Group-think and professional conflicts of interest can occur here and there, but science proceeds reliably overall. So, in general, believe scientists.

But we want to be skeptical. Fine, be skeptical. I’m all about being skeptical. You want to say the science isn’t settled? There is uncertainty in climate science, as in all scientific studies of complex systems, but there is consensus about the grave risks of rising CO2 levels. Let’s just play what if, though. What if the science here were very uncertain? What if there was a lot of division among scientists on this issue? Still the denialists’ position is the wrong one.

Because, the fact is, there some general principles, which are not uncertain, that should guide us even in the face of uncertainty. One general principle that is clear from geological history is that complex systems like the atmosphere are not necessarily stable. They are prone to “tipping points” due to positive and negative feedback mechanisms. That’s the key insight of chaos theory. Chaos theory first was discovered by a meteorologist studying weather patterns. It applies in spades to planetary climate dynamics. In the distant past, such tipping points have led to several sudden changes that caused mass extinctions. Look at the great oxygenation event, the iceball earth period, and the Cambrian extinction. Look at the runaway greenhouse effect on Venus. 

Better yet, though, look at a picture of the earth at night from space. You see all those points of light from all the populated territories worldwide? Those are essentially coal fires, if you think about it. Now, don't you think all those coal fires could have some effect, in principle, on the makeup of the atmosphere? Keep in mind that the atmosphere is only a few miles thick. So when we do big things to the atmosphere, like releasing a huge proportion of the earth’s buried carbon into the terrestrial carbon cycle, there is no basis for assuming this is safe to do. Particularly there is no basis for this assumption of harmlessness when we know that CO2 is a greenhouse gas (whatever logarithmic decay it’s heat trapping potential may exhibit) and that it is precisely correlated with temperature over the course of geologic history as far back as the ice cores can take us.

Given what we know about the atmosphere and climate history, any uncertainty in climate models should be all the more reason to take steps to cut carbon emissions. It actually isn’t the end of the world to phase out fossil fuels. Look at the carbon tax and dividend plan, now being promoted by Republicans mind you. It’s projected to be a net benefit to the economy, due to job creation, market stabilization, economic stimulation from dividends, and other factors. Green energy costs slightly more at present, but that cost is because of increased labor inputs. Fossil fuel extraction is technology heavy. Green energy is more labor heavy, as far as production. So there’s truth behind the whole green jobs thing. No one should be against this.

Furthermore, and finally, and perhaps most importantly, who the hell gave these two or three generations the right to burn up all the fossil fuels on the planet anyway? Ever think about that?