Nascent Science
The Earth Cools, and Fight Over Warming Heats Up:
The researchers behind those studies strenuously reject that description. But they disagree among themselves on how long the cooling will last. The British paper says warming will resume as early as this year. The German paper says warming won’t resume for perhaps a decade.The center of gravity of this argument is why we should base policy on the long-term predictions of models that nobody expects to be able to predict short-term weather. Put another way, what is the climate science equivalent of the short-term/long-term/very-long-term framework that macroeconomics has? In economics, there are clearly stated different assumptions for what variables are exogenous and why over these three different time horizons. It is entirely possible for a model to be valid in the very long term and be useless in the short term, but the argument still needs to be made.Such disagreements aren’t unusual in a nascent science. “I don’t think anybody is surprised that we’re going to get one model that suggests it’s going to cool and another that suggests it’s going to warm,” says Vicky Pope, a scientist at the Hadley Center, the U.K. institute where the research for the British paper was done. “That’s consistent with where we are with the science.”
