It is interesting to analyze the claims of people who oppose the current discourse of climate change. One useful instance is a recent interview, published by a Pittsburgh-area newspaper (owned by Richard Scaife), with Vancouver-based scientist Dr. Timothy Ball. Though his claims about the political motives of various players seem odd, a few of his more scientific claims piqued my interest. Here are the ones which might be worth mulling over (I’ll be paraphrasing, in single quotes, and then adding my comments):

• ‘Global warming began in 1680.’ Yes, that was the beginning of the current interglacial. It reminds us that, carbon dioxide or no, the climate changes.
• ‘Global warming is caused by the sun.’ And he doesn’t mean in the obvious sense that the sun supplies the energy captured by the greenhouse effect. He means that sunspot and sun-based magnetic and radiation activity has changed enough recently to explain the vast majority of global warming. This claim I don’t know how to evaluate, but I’ll be on the lookout for sunspot data.
• ‘In the history of the earth, climate change happens all the time.’ Correct. I always return in my mind to the example, discussed in Diamond’s Collapse, of the inhabitants of Greenland, who were wiped out by a massive climate shift — but, as well, wiped out by their own resistance to adaptation.
• ‘Since 1998, the global temperature has gone down.’ Umm, well, that’s cheating. 1998 was a spike in hot weather. If you look at any trend lines, the lines go up. And pick 1997 or 1999, or any other year since the 18th century, and global temperature has gone up.
• ‘I wouldn’t mind a warmer world if I lived in Canada or Russia.’ A-hah, we catch Dr. Ball as a Canadian happy to be a potential winner in a future warmer world. He is correct — Canada and Russia will, on balance, be winners in most stages of a globally warmed world. However, Ball thinks the world is cooling…
• ‘Longer frost-free winters will lead to less energy use.’ Well, true enough, and possibly most significant in Canada and Russia. But the longer hot summers will lead to much more electricity use for cooling — air conditioning especially. And with most electricity still created by fossil fuels like coal and natural gas… you do the math.
• ‘We will be much, much cooler by 2030.’ This one is very hard to evaluate, because it completely dismisses the greenhouse effect. I suppose we’ll know in 23 years. However, it would be good to know what evidence he has in mind — that sunspot and solar radiation activity will be changing? That the earth’s orbit will be moving in a certain direction? What basis for such a prediction could he have?
• ‘Most ice is already in the ocean’. Ok. When discussing Greenland and Antarctica, I find scientists quite clear about the difference between ice-cover on oceans - whose melting does not raise the sea level - and ice-shelves/glaciers, which either sit on land or are supported by the land. We’re not worried about general ice melt; we are worried about ice-shelves giving way, or of sheets of ice sliding off Greenland’s mountains and into the ocean.
• ‘The sea level is not level.’ He’s talking about the various ways in which the ocean isn’t really a smooth equal level everywhere. This claim seems more like sand in the face to his critics — measuring sea level is no doubt complex, and involves many adjustments and averages, just like average temperature. But is this supposed to help the inhabitants of, oh, Tuvalu?
• ‘We are incorrectly taught that change always happens uniformly and gradually — I call this incorrect belief “uniformitarianism”.’ Ball has a very good point here. Change can be sudden. I seem to remember that Stephen Jay Gould made a claim about sudden change in evolution — “punctuated equilibrium” — and that important past geologist Louis Agassiz worked very hard to get people to believe that massive changes, in the form of an ice age, could have occurred.

Ball’s point about uniformitarianism cuts both ways, however. Just as easily, we as a world culture might have bumped the world - via our carbon orgy - into a non-uniform temperature and climate shift which we can no longer control.