Graham's Natural BS On Climate

Radio talkmeister Michael Graham of WTKK -- whose show I enjoy participating in as an occasional guest -- is wrong-headed on many things, but today in his Boston Herald column he takes easy whacks at climate change science, and that's a topic where I often feel the need to call out conservative commentators.

It's fun and easy for climate-change skeptics to do this kind of column. Climate science is, in fact, imperfect and continually developing (as its experts openly admit), so specific theories and predictive models come and go -- providing fun examples of how "wrong" it is.

Plus, the changes we're talking about happen in big-picture, complex trends, which means there are seemingly contradictory variances within the overall scenario. Again, lots of fun can be had with this.

But none of that changes the overwhelming scientific evidence that climate change is very, very real, and that its effects will be severely disruptive for the planets ecosystems, including millions upon millions of humans.

There is an enormous and ever-expanding trove of research and analysis on this topic, by thousands of the world's top scientists working in this specific discipline. To brush all of that aside on the basis of a few layman's "hey, what's up with this snow!" observations is ridiculous -- more ridiculous than, say, if I were to brush aside all of Graham's arguments simply on the basis that he refers to "Anthropomorphic Global Warming" rather than the correct "anthropogenic global warming."

Look, Graham is right about one thing -- science is still trying to figure out what the specific regional effects of global warming will be. For instance, there have been arguments that much of Russia's currently frozen land will become arable, allowing it to become the breadbasket to much of Europe and Africa, where grain production will be greatly reduced; thus massively enhancing Russia's global power and influence. But other models suggest that weather patterns will produce a very different effect. We don't know yet.

Apparently Graham knows, though -- he's smarter than all of those "scientists" with their detailed research and analysis. He knows that we don't have to worry about any of that stuff happening. He must be like those animals who can supposedly sense the coming weather. Or maybe he thinks, in the popular terminology of Sarah Palin and other conservatives, that science is best practiced by "common sense." Whatever that means.