Check out this oped in the Tennessean by a petroleum geologist and energy consultant named Gerry Calhoun:
Are we worrying about the wrong type of climate change? Perhaps impending cold, rather than global warming, represents the real danger.
Yup--it's that bad. Reading the oped, you'd think we hadn't learned anything about the various causes of climate change--natural, anthropogenic, and how much each is contributing--during the last several decades. Calhoun doesn't even mention the conclusions of the IPCC on this score. But he says things like this:
So what can we expect — 1 degree hotter or 3 degrees colder? Climate models can be constructed to prove either outcome, a situation that should warn us about the predictive accuracy of models.
Rather than there identifying better or worse models--or wiser still, finding a consensus range for the best models--all models are to be tossed out, apparently. It's probably a fool's errand to track and refute these sorts of things in local papers. But still, it's a staggering reminder just how far we haven't come in winning broader acceptance of modern climate science.
