Editor's Letter: The “Aarrggghhh!” element and global warming

last updated 8 January 2015

The 2009 hurricane season officially ended this week, and in case you hadn’t noticed (good news is no news), not a single hurricane-level storm touched down in the U.S. Not one. Not long ago, as Katrina and Ike were flattening the Gulf Coast and Florida, climatologists were warning that more severe hurricanes would be one of global warming’s many catastrophic consequences. What happened? Well, the scientists say, hurricane formation is a complex phenomenon, subject to many variables. Ah, complexity. It can’t be avoided in dealing with the natural world, and with the atmosphere in particular, where thousands of variables are in flux at any given moment. Yet simple, black-and-white narratives—such as that the world is getting warmer and warmer every year—are so much more satisfying, and so much easier to understand. Right, Phil Jones, director of the influential Climate Research Unit at Britain’s University of East Anglia? “Aarrggghhh!” Jones wrote of another load of contradictory, complex data about global warming, in one of the e-mails that hackers recently revealed to the world. “We can have a proper result, but only by including a load of garbage.”

So does “climategate’’ prove that global warming is all garbage? CRU scientists, I’d wager, truly and honestly believe that greenhouse gases are causing a dangerous heating of the atmosphere. But in their political and scientific struggle with skeptics, they decided it was necessary to fudge a few facts and screen out troubling zigs and zags on the graphs. When you’re the Good Guys, working to save the Earth, a little intellectual dishonesty seems like no great sin. It’s tempting, isn’t it, to see what you want to see, to seek simple, black-and-white narratives, and ignore all contradictory evidence? Complexity: Aarrggghhh.