from global warming to climate change
I woke to (another) white surrounding. It’s already March, a time where the birds should chirp and the flowers blossom.
When you can see the snow in a picture, you know it’s really really strong. Just a week after a stretch of warm sunny days, followed by a blast of Xynthia storm, it’s back to 0°C freeze again.
Predicting and forecasting the weather has always been a frustrating and ultimately unrewarding task for ages. The most expensive computers and the best scientists are utilized to deliver a result which accuracy doesn’t match other areas of science. To be sure, it’s leaps and bounds ahead of what we had 10 years ago, but it still a lot of catching up to do.
Ever heard of the term “butterfly effect”, where a butterfly flap in India would cause a hurricane in Mexico? The term has been used to describe a cascading events or to describe the unpredictability of nature. For me, that’s an inaccurate usage of the term, which was originally intended to describe the limitation of the human knowledge.
Many years ago, a scientist was on his way to create a model for the weather, and he keyed in today’s weather (called the starting condition) to predict the weather for the coming days. When he tried to change the starting condition just minimally, he got a radically different result in the end. He then gave this phenomenon its term. Honestly, that’s simply evidence that the model was inadequate and inaccurate, isn’t it?
Sometimes, humans tend to over-exaggerate their capability of figuring out the nature. Early scientists see it as a way of worshiping and marveling the wonders of God’s creation. Nowadays, it is becoming a religion by itself, where any discovery is “worshipped” as the ultimate truth, and scientists hailed as the “preacher”. We simply fail to realize the limitation of the human mind.
Even as the rage of Green Revolution is sweeping every country and society, I can’t help but to wonder what the future generation is going to think about this. When we look at the sailors of the Middle ages, we laugh at them because they were afraid that their ships would fall off the edge of the earth. Would the future generation laugh at us, saying that we were paranoid about the earth blowing itself up because of carbon-dioxide?
In no way I can claim myself to be knowledgeable in this area. But I do find the unwavering confidence in (unproven) explanation of the current weather condition slightly disturbing. A few years ago, scientist called it the global warming, and carbon dioxide is the culprit. After a few years of storm, hurricanes and freezing winters, it’s called the climate change now. Though I don’t understand why carbon dioxide can be a culprit in this, it’s still the black sheep.
I love Mother Nature, I do. But I also think that instead of claiming to be a Know-It-All of the nature, we should humble ourselves to truly try to understand the workings of it. A fool is not someone who doesn’t understand something, but one who doesn’t admit it.
Snow on!