The Kudzu Files

"there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns -- the ones we don't know we don't know."

Donald Rumsfeld said lots of things during his time before an open mic, but this has always been one of my favorites. It's also one of the things he said that actually made perfect sense to me. But in the global warming debate, it probably should be re-written:

"there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns -- and we don't have to worry about those."

I'm not going to say that human activities are definitely causing an abnormal change in natural warming and cooling cycles. There is plenty of evidence that something is happening - carbon dioxide levels seem to be higher than at any point in the past hundred thousand years, and the rate of increase seems to be increasing abnormally; permafrost that has been frozen for over ten thousand years is melting (which could release methane, a more destructive greenhoue gas than carbon dioxide, into the atmosphere); the Greenland ice sheet appears to be melting faster than natural cycling would predict. You can find more examples - but none provide absolute evidence of global warming caused by human activity, and apparently it will require absolute evidence before some people will decide we should try to do something. I overheard a conversation the other day, some people talking about Al Gore's movie "An Inconvenient Truth". One of the people replied "I'm a Republican, I don't listen to Al Gore". That makes as much sense as someone who says "I don't like that doctor, so I'm not getting my child vaccinated". Their child might not get sick anyway, so why worry? But we do worry, and even though nothing may happen, we do something about it. We do something because we can. The history of vaccine development shows it was expensive, it was often controversial, and during the process many very smart people got some things wrong. But we were smart enough to understand that something was going on that we could affect. Looking back over the past century, it seems like a pretty damn good idea. If we're driving and we see something that causes us to be uncertain of the road conditions ahead, we slow down until we're sure. We don't just go speeding on. Unless, of course, we're idiots. We recognize that we need more data, and until we get more data we should proceed with a little caution.

So what's the deal with the global warming debate? Maybe we don't have everything right. Maybe we don't understand all the data. But we have the technology to do some things. We could clean things up a bit while we're trying to understand better what's happening. But it's so much easier to just sit there and do nothing, and point to every pseudo-scientific or near-scientific study claiming to refute the studies that show something we don't want to believe. It's easier to say "we're not sure, let's not do anything right now", and find the one or two guys in the room saying things we agree with.

As a friend said this weekend, it's what all the cool ostriches are doing this year.