What I Learned About Global Warming In San Diego

While taking a break from freezing in St Paul, MN at the Joint Mathematical Meeting in San Diego, CA, I attended a full day of sessions on global warming. About half of the speakers were genuine mathematicians moonlighting as meteorologists and the others were meteorologists moonlighting as mathematicians. Either way, very smart people talking about--mostly--what the state of the art of global warming knowledge.

Here's what I came away convinced of:

• As best as we know, yes, man-made carbon emissions (plus a number of other things that get much less publicity but are much more harmful ton for ton) is pushing up the global temperatures.
• It will go up at least two degrees Celsius, but perhaps much more than that.
• From a biology point of view, a degree or three is no big deal, but 5+ is a really bad thing.

But here's what else I learned:

• Clouds matter alot, and we don't begin to understand or account for them in the models and studies.
• Hurricanes are the same way (full disclosure--I learned that at a talk in St Paul, but it fits right in).
• No model we have is granular enough to really do more than general trends.
• Many, many models are all pointing in the same direction.

I really can't argue anymore about the reality of global warming. I really can't argue anymore about how it makes sense to find ways to reduce emissions or at least compensate for them.

All that said, I'll be damned if I don't argue till I'm blue in the face for the use of solid, rigorous, validated economics, science, and business approaches to solving the problem.

Hard problems require hard-nosed insistence on effective solutions based on real science, hard nosed economics, and working with--not against--markets and business, the freer the better.