Concern about global warming has as much to do with faith as science. That’s the contention of Roy Spencer, principal research scientist at the University of Alabama at Huntsville.
Spencer spoke today to a John Locke Foundation group in Wilmington. He denied claims that science definitively proves harmful impacts from global warming:
I believe man-made global warming is as much a faith-based belief as it is science-based. I do believe there is man-made global warming. I don’t think science knows how much it is.
Ultimately, we have to use climate models. I’ve become convinced of that, even though I’m not part of a modeling group. It is true that ultimately you have to put what you know about the atmosphere into the equations that we have that pretty much describe how the atmosphere operates, which is a model. And you run this model on a computer and see what happens when you change things in the model.
Everyone assumes that the climate models are good enough now to give us a pretty good idea about what’s going to happen in the future. I don’t believe it. I think that’s just faith. There’s no reason to believe it. How much you believe it depends on how much you believe the model, not because you’ve been convinced of anything.
Science — usually you need to run experiments to test different hypotheses. I’ve thought a lot about this: There is no experiment you can run to test global warming — unless you had another Earth somewhere that you could pump full of carbon dioxide and then see what happened over there.
I mean what we need to know is what’s going on now. We’re part of the grand experiment right now. And I don’t think there’s any way to know for sure what’s going to happen in the future.
Spencer plans to collect his ideas in a book to be published in 2007.
