I just watched the extremely controversial Channel 4 British TV program on Global Warming.

It’s interesting to me for two reasons.

Firstly, my own hunch has always been that our understanding of climate is way, way to primitive to be making the kind of political decisions that are being made. Yes, it might be wise to cut CO2 emissions while the jury is out, but instead we have a lot of sound and fury – and no actual emission cuts. And, frankly? Compared to the understanding of climate we’ll have in 100 years it’s fairly clear our current models are laughable. Note that I’m skirting whether I believe in man made global warming or not: yes, the current evidence as reported by the papers says “SURE!” but my gut… we’re just not there yet. Too many little weird anomalies, too much yelling. Something’s not right: we didn’t see this kind of mayhem around, say, AIDS deniers because the HIV-AIDS link was solid and easy to demonstrate. The harsheness of the rhetoric tells me something is wrong.

It may just be that the case isn’t fully baked and, once it is, it’ll settle down. It could also be that there’s a lot more going on with climate than we currently know.

Anyway, all that aside, the second interesting point was realizing that I have no clue what is going on. I’m a pretty reasonable all round general scientist: I can give broadly accurate arm waving descriptions of what’s going on about most phenomena we’ve got good scientific models of (my chemistry, neurology and astrophysics are weak, however.)

But this global warming debate isn’t amenable to that level of understanding: it needs extremely precise and clear understanding of not just individual facts, like what the ice core records say, but also the correlation between facts like how that correlates with temperature records, and exactly how those records are computed. Plus there are additional levels where different branches of science collide: specialists in solar measuring solar output arguing with people studying how plankton create clouds with dimethyl sulfide about which one is responsible for what’s going on. It’s not just hard science, it’s hard, interdisciplinary science with massive political ramifications.

I keep thinking about the Great Red Spot on Jupiter, and two space squid discussing what causes it…

We have a lot of explanations for complex systems, for turbulence, for fluid dynamics and for chaos. But we don’t have much in the way of fundamental understanding of these systems, at the end of the day, and that’s why the climate argument is so damn shaky. You can’t model the atmosphere properly, there are too many factors for one individual to understand all of it, and single facts about things like C02 uptake in water, or subduction of ocean-buried carbon by tectonic activity turn the whole model one way or the other.

We’re in trouble. We need to know, and we don’t, and hundreds of millions of lives might be in the balance.

I hope that this issue raises two new generations of scientists, people who understand how important it is to Know, and are willing to work for it.