TO KNOW OR NOT TO KNOW

It may sound retrograde to bemoan the proliferation of media and easy access to information, but are we better educated as a result? I recently witnessed school children using research taken from internet sources in essays and being unable to pronounce the words or, I would guess, really understand their meanings, yet presenting the ideas as their own.

If those young people were to make the effort to go the extra mile and truly comprehend those arguments, then they may have learned something.

But you cannot be too hard on them if you consider that we all have problems in distinguishing, in the face of plenty, what is important or not and what is relevant or not and what we really need to know.

I saw a fascinating TV news report recently which graphically showed how research scientists drilling into the Antartica ice cap, have found evidence that global warming is not responsible for the rapid meltdown going on there. The big unfreeze is not a result of anything we are doing to destroy the ozone layer, apparently, but the effect of the ice mountains melting from inside because of bubbles of gases lodged there from earlier pollution, millions of years ago — long before we ever discovered combustion.

And you may have already heard that aerosols are not the baddies they were supposed to have been but rather the opposite. Now we are to believe that they actually reduce global warming. And, I am sure you haven’t missed the news either that forests cause large amounts of methane emissions — methane is believed to be a major contributor to global warming.

This esteemed newspaper featured, last Saturday, a full-page spread on sea levels rising because Greenland’s glaciers are melting at an annual rate of 200 cubic kilometres, which is twice as fast as a decade ago. These NASA and University of Kansas researchers think rising air temperatures may be the cause — warmer air accelerates melting and the water gets in behind the rock and the ice sheet causing the sheet to slip into the sea. Greenland’s ice could take up to 1000 years to completely melt and by then sea levels would have risen by seven metres. So, I presume, a freak wave then in the Atlantic could knock out most of Port-of-Spain, if it were still standing.

Now that does concern us. Or should it? Why should the cause of the Greenland melting be any different from the Antartica melting? And why is there so much confusion about what is going on?

The truth is that the scientists do not really know. Climate change modelling is up the proverbial gum tree. One explanation I read speculated that new discoveries were, by default, omitted from the models of climate change that are used to predict the future. And the basic data for these models — the global temperature, is based on uncertain estimates that change every year. So, whichever data scientists use it would be prone to random fluctuations over time. And, by the way, some data suggests that global warming is actually slowing down, contrary to what other studies would have us believe.

So what are we supposed to do? What are we to believe? What will inform our actions?

You just might say to hell with it and start buying aerosol products again, if you ever gave them up. You may start feeling sorry for all those methane-producing chickens that are dying from bird flu. The countries that contain the majority of the world’s forests may decide that felling them is a very good thing for buoying up their economies. And, all the lessons in saving the planet that we have been drumming into our children’s heads may be in vain.

None of this is desirable because as the old folk used to say "there is no smoke without fire." Not because the scientists can’t really solve the mystery does it mean we have to ignore the evidence that something is going on that will affect us, probably adversely. The problem is why give us so much contradictory information when we cannot assess the value of any of it and make sensible choices?

Scientists have to rush to publish and be ahead of other researchers and we are the audience as they play out their dramas, but it is not for our benefit. Perhaps they ought to keep all that knowledge to themselves and leave us in our blissful ignorance till they get the story straight.

All I want from them, meanwhile, is to know when the next tsunami is coming so that I can run.