THE POLITICS of global warming is heating up. Activists are often taking sharply opposing sides on nearly every one of the warming issues. Trite and ad hoc political arguments intrude unapologetically upon the science of climatology. But thoughtful people prefer to have science to show the way. After all, climate change is not a political fashion. It is about observable alterations in the natural environment of our planet regarding which scientists seek to understand the causes and thus forecast future trends and eventual outcomes.
Unfortunately, among all the issues governments have to deal with, none is as scientifically complex as climate change. Disparate causes, natural and man-made, alter the climate through innately complicated and incompletely understood mechanisms and quite insufficiently measured networks of interaction. And they do so over timescales which are generally quite long compared to those on which we humans have made precise measurements-or on which we make decisions. Climate, after all, is simply weather averaged over decades to millennia. This intricacy of climate change makes forecasts about global warming seem unreliable. And the seeming unreliability offers a wide berth for endless political disagreements. It makes it easy to disparage as "alarmist" those who warn us of rising sea levels and other compelling consequences of warming.
