It is true that a majority of the scientists who study climatic tendencies in our atmosphere have arrived at the conclusion that the world’s climate is changing, and they have convinced a group of politicians, some of whom are politically powerful, of the truth of their conclusions.

A minority, however, is skeptical. Some believe that recent data that suggest that the average temperature of the atmosphere is going up can be explained by natural variations in solar radiation and that global warming is a temporary phenomenon. Others believe that the historical evidence indicating that the temperature of the atmosphere is going up at a dangerous rate is simply not reliable.

Such lacks of agreement are common in the sciences. They are reduced and eventually eliminated with the accumulation of new evidence and of more refined theories or even by completely new ones. Such debates can persist for a period of decades. Academics often throw invective at one another in these debates. But typically this does not mean much.

But the case of climate change is different. If the evidence indicates that global warming is progressive, is caused principally by our industrial processes, and will probably cause disastrous changes in our atmosphere before the end of the twenty-first century, then we do not have the time to verify precisely if this evidence is reliable. Such a process would be a question of many years of new investigations. And if the alarmist climatologists are right, such a delay would be tragic for all humanity.

The difficulty is that economic and climatologic systems are very complicated. They are not like celestial mechanics, which involves only the interaction of gravity and centrifugal force, and efforts to construct computerized models to describe these complicated systems simply cannot include all the factors that are influential in the evolution of these complicated systems.

All this does not necessarily indicate that the alarmist climatologists are not right. But it really means that if global warming is occurring, we cannot know exactly what will be the average temperature of our atmosphere in the year 2100 and what will be the average sea level of the world’s ocean in that year.

It also means that we cannot be confident that efforts by the industrialized countries to reduce the amount of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere will have a significant influence on the evolution of the world’s climate.

Alas, the reduction of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere would be very costly and would greatly change the lives of all the inhabitants of our planet–with the possibility (perhaps even the probability!) that all these efforts will be completely useless.

Harleigh Kyson Jr.

CORRECTION: This casse name is spelled “Goodridge”

Judge Robert Bork said of the Romney situation, “the deeper failure must go to the man who stood as governor, the man who stood holding the lever s of the executive branch.

CORRECTION: Apparently I was miquoted. It was not Bork who said this. It was Professor of Jurisprudence Hadley Arkes. (Steve has corrected this at his blog.)

I think I kind of have the same taste in music as well. I’ve rocked out with Disciple, Grits, Matt Kearney, DC Talk, Third Day (by the way, the girl singer for FlyLeaf was on their latest album), Spoken, Five Iron Frenzy, Supertones, Brave Saint Saturn, Thousand Foot Krutch, FM Static, among other small indie bands.

You should definitely look into disciple, Grits, and Spoken though. They have that hard edge that you might like. Grits is more R&B rap, Disciple and Spoken are more hardcore rock type music.

I would totally listen to your radio station though… That would be pretty awesome.

Also, for what it’s worth,
if you want to find out more about the world of fan films, you might want to check out my daily fan film blog, fancinematoday.com.