So, I do get it, that there are arguments that can be made about how climate change is either not happening or it's just part of the passing parade of weather, don't worry about it.
Let me give an example, the conditions or processes that can change climate are called 'forcings' and forcing can have feedback which either amplifies or attenuates the impact of the forcing. Turns out there are a lot of forcings and a lot of feedbacks.. In the recent report from the Artic council about the state of the Artic cryosphere, we find this - "Of those feedbacks expected to have strong effects, eight lead to further and/or accelerated warming, and just one leads to cooling."
Now, I could go to two different web sites and find one which used as it's 'evidence' that world is in imminent danger one or more of the positive feedbacks and another one which used the negative feedbacks as evidence that everything will be ok.
It's nice having these plausible physical explanations which can be incorporated into predictive models, but more important to me are these two facts, also embedded within the same report:
1) The intensity of feedbacks between
the cryosphere and climate are not yet
well quantified, either within the Arctic
or globally. This lends considerable
uncertainty to predictions of how much
and how fast the cryosphere and the
Arctic environment will change.
2) Model projections reported by
the Intergovernmental Panel
on Climate Change (IPCC) in
2007 underestimated the rates of
change now observed in sea ice.
Ok, so there is uncertainty and the models are wrong, but what's the trend? Things are happening faster and we don't know how fast they will go or if they will slow down.
Seems like that is a pretty big question and we better find out soon. Prudent risk management behavior would be taking mitigation steps for what we do know is happening with a plan to either ramp mitigation up or close it down depending on the outcome of more research and observations.
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