A water expert, John Matthews, blogs for the Observer Research Foundation: “How to prepare for unpredictable climate events to ensure water sustainability.” He frames his discussion in terms of what he calls “stationarity,” or the existence of a stable world for predictive purposes. Let me reframe that for my purposes. For any planetary phenomenon which we need to predict in the light of global warming, the past (i.e. past data) is useful but not the end of the story. On a planet that for human purposes has been stable and slow-changing, the rapid warming we’re engendering, however, small changes in, say, temperature, can quickly take us into the unknown. The past data no longer predicts the future. We need to develop models based on scientific principles that can take our comprehension into the new Anthropocene era. Of course, such models are what have been built over the last four decades, and they’re now pretty hot shit.
This issue of the past being an imperfect predictor of the future is what renders the slippery bullshit of semi-deniers such as Bjorn Lomborg as exactly that, bullshit. Lomborg is forever saying, “look, things haven’t gotten worse in the past, so they won’t in the future.” We know (and he knows) that he’s just deflecting attention, just deferring action. Ignore slippery bullshit, folks, and trust the models.