The El Mincho effect

Further to my preceding remarks on Nick Minchin’s enthusiasm for a sceptical approach on climate change...

Senator Minchin’s background as a solicitor renders his claims about the science of climate change about as authoritative as the next thinking person’s. And of course his position as a high official in an historically ‘denialist’ government will have no bearing on his public utterances.

Interestingly, on the one hand we have Finance Minister Minchin casting doubt on human-induced climate effects; while, on the other hand, Environment Minister Turnbull has lately gone to great lengths to assure the public that the Howard Government has been working assiduously for the last ten years to mitigate such human-induced effects. On balance, I’d conjecture that there’s either a lot of wasted effort or a lot of hot air in this Government.

No doubt, as a man with a sceptical but open mind, Minchin will also draw comfort from recent findings that “the impact of cosmic rays on the climate could be greater than scientists suspect.”

Henrik Svensmark, a weather scientist in Denmark, said the experiments suggested that man’s influence on global warming might be rather less than was supposed by the bulk of scientific opinion.

• The Australian, February 12 2007

Now there’s food for sceptical thought, eh?

I have no doubt that there are roughly cyclical patterns, and even irregular events, at play on the climatology of the planet. But if the best heads in climate science are saying that, in their best judgement, X is happening and that Y is the most likely cause, then it’s perhaps the height of arrogance for a Minchin to be denying the proverbial elephant in the room.

Well, of course, the overwhelming weight of authority has been wrong in the past — viz., the long dominance of Aristotelian/Ptolemaic cosmology — but I tend to think the checks and balances of our modern scientific culture are somewhat better these days as a guarantor of authenticity.

I could, of course, be entirely wrong about that — and undoubtedly the Ptolemaic philosophers thought they themselves were at the coalface of ‘truth’ — but I don’t think so. It’s also possible that El Mincho is the Galileo of climate science, but again I don’t think so.