What to make of the year without a winter

By ROBERT ROYAL

The most exasperating thing about humankind is not, as T.S. Eliot wrote, that we “cannot bear very much reality.” It is the corollary: We can bear far too much unreality. I’ve been reminded of that in this strangely warm winter here on the East Coast as I’ve seen news stories linking the unseasonably nice weather to human-caused (anthropogenic) global warming.

I do not know for certain whether anthropogenic warming is real, though I looked carefully at it for a book I wrote years ago. Neither do you. And neither do the scientists. Climate change involves many complexities and uncertain comparisons with events over geologic time. The carbon dioxide we generate must cause some effects, though what exactly calls for modesty. Yet I find unreality in both main camps that might have made even T.S. Eliot tear his hair.

To begin with, Mother Nature would not exactly qualify as a Republican or a Democrat. She does not seem entirely docile under free markets or government regulation. Nature has, all on its own, warmed and cooled faster than anything we’ve seen in the past century. If you think the Year Without a Winter is a sign of our evil addiction to oil, what do you make of the geologic evidence that in the past 1.5 million years climate has multiple times turned New England temperatures to those of Miami in as little as 25 years? Just 9,000 years ago, at the end of the last Ice Age, the earth was four degrees warmer than today.

Then, there is 1816 -- the Year Without a Summer -- still not entirely understood, but partly due to what scientists call the Dalton Minimum, a low cycle of solar magnetic activity, actually one of several in the period known as the Little Ice Age (1300s to 1900s), which followed the Medieval Optimum, when grapes grew in Nova Scotia -- Vineland to the Vikings. Further, the sun seems to have moved, as it does in a roughly 180-year-long cycle, to a slightly different position within our solar system. But there was also -- such coincidences often occur -- volcanic eruption in Indonesia, which may have had worldwide effects. Volcanoes routinely emit sulfur dioxide and other pollutants at far higher than human levels.

This, and much more of an astonishing and unpredictable character, is the nature God made. Now, this should not make anyone complacent about what we may be doing to creation. In spite of the irritation of some Republicans, the ecological movement has done some good. Water and air are cleaner than just a few decades ago. We pay more attention to preserving or restoring natural settings.

But contrary to a certain kind of ecological enthusiast (there are conservatives, if not many Republicans, in this category), nature was not benign or even very stable prior to modern industrialized society. A few years ago an otherwise intelligent woman who occupies a chair at our most prestigious Catholic university told me during a conference sponsored by the American bishops that humans and nature were not at odds until greed entered the picture. It’s a shame such persons cannot be in e-mail contact with our cave-dwelling forbears or any number of people who fought droughts, famine, floods, epidemics, tsunamis or wild animals over the centuries.

We got into earlier trouble not out of greed. We just didn’t realize our power as our industries and technologies grew in response to human needs. When we did, we took steps to correct them and succeeded in spite of corporate and political foot-draggers. But every environmental question deserves an appropriate response, which means we have to use our brains prudently. Though the earth is warming to a certain extent, we need, as the statistician Bjorn Lomborg has shown, to assess the urgency of the problem. No family would, for example, spend all its resources on a new furnace or non-polluting car if other and greater needs also existed. Mr. Lomborg’s careful statistical assessment is that many problems, including those of the world’s poorest, are more pressing. Global warming’s effects are likely manageable.

Prudence dictates that we take a calm and open-eyed approach. Half of what we call global warming occurred before the 1940s, prior to the anthropogenic buildup of carbon dioxide in the air. Nature was already moving in a direction that has nothing to do with us. From the middle of the century to the 1970s, there was unusually cold weather in the world, while the last quarter of a century has been unusually warm. Should we place a huge economic and human bet on the basis of this evidence?

Personally, I think it’s wise to keep the question open. It may be a good idea on other grounds to reduce our consumption of fossil fuels and live simpler lives. For many people, this seems to be the underlying belief that makes them sympathetic to environmental extremism. For the rest of us, warming is one of several challenges. Our ancestors fought scarcity. We deal with problems of abundance. In a fallen world, that’s only to be expected. But let’s not add to the reality of our problems the unreality of overheated, hasty and unwise solutions.

Robert Royal is director of the Faith and Reason Institute.

National Catholic Reporter, February 2, 2007