Modeling Doom

YOU CAN'T WALK OUTSIDE on a hot summer afternoon, feel the heat, walk back inside, and proclaim for all the world to hear that climate change is a reality, and that you just proved it. It just doesn't work that way. Maybe the temperature would still be one hundred degrees or more if homo sapien sapiens had never injected a single ounce of industrial carbon into the atmosphere. You can't manufacture another Earth out of thin air, an identical Earth inhabited only by pre industrial people, and compare the two duplicate worlds, ours and theirs, in terms of atmoshperic composition, heat retention, and climate change. But you can use computer simulations, construct models, and make those exact comparisons, in cyber space, if not rock solid reality. That is what climate scientists, and probably many other kinds of scientists have done, often enough to convince themselves that climate change cuased by human activity and not mother nature is indeed a proven, stark reality. They haven't convinced all of us lay folks, and many are beyond convincing, aka conservatives, but the scientific community is united, dead set certain that human made climate change is here, and getting more extreme, fast. In the nineteen sixties and seventies, where I live, we had a run of several years in which the weather for the Fourth of July was picture perfect for the holiday. Clear, sunny, puffy cumulus clouds, soft breeze but no wind, perfect for throwing firecrackers at each other and having good, rousing bottle rocket fights. I liked to insert a firecacker into the spaces between strips of bark on a large tree, and set it off. It never fazed the forty foot tall forty foot canopy deciduous tree with a trunk eight feet around, but it was fun trying. I like to think that I knew in advance that no harm would come to the tree. I remember being in Minnesota in August, 1966, when the temperature was one hundred degrees. I was eleven years old, and confused and surprised by the heat being so hot so far up north. I was in Minneapolis one year in the nineteen sixties the day or two after Independence Day, and I was somewhat surprised that for several days after the holiday, you could still hear fireworks exploding all over the city, slowed down a bit, but not stopped. I loved firewroks when I was a kid. Now as an old man, I despise them with a passion beyond expression, mostly because they injure people and terrify animals. My last bottle rocket fight eventuated when I was 22, old enough to know better,so, I hung in there as a kid as a young adult. In that last botttle rocket fight,I took one just above my left eye. It made a circular indented scar the shape of a bottle rocket butt in my left eyebrow, which I can still see. I'm lucky I can still see out of that eye. The formerly usually warm sunny days of Independence Day have morphed into usually blistering hot days of climate change. Anybody my age or a decade or two older or younger knows damned good and well that the "climate", which means long term weather patterns, has changed. Its that obvious. It used to snow where I live, but no more. October used to be a cold month. Now its a summer month. Spring used to begin at the very end of March, not late February. We oldsters don't need computer models to know that climate change is real. We have lived it, and still are. Progressive oldsters know that humans are causing it, because we believe in science. Old conservatives pretend that it would be happening anyway. I can think of no way to prove them wrong, of proving a negative. Climate scientists, all of them, know that we are causing climate change. They are preaching to the choir, so to speak, because thsoe who refuse to see reality beasuse it contradicts their political beliefs are not going to change their politics, or their attendant comfortable illusions, no matter how many computer models or hot summer days in March you show them.