Twenty years is too short to say much about climate. In someplace balanced on a knife-edge as to water (say parts of Middle East), maybe, but not in North America. Too bad I'll hear about this for weeks "global hoax", just as I would have had the same study showed a statistically significant drying "global crises".
There are so many reasons having nothing to do with climate to expect as well as to want patterns thought to be man's contribution to climate variability to themselves change. Poisoning people with exhaust gasses is an obvious example, worth avoiding if you are a people. There are so many reasons to avoid creating a nearly global nearly total dictatorship to manage human caused weather affects that doubts about climate variability need not even be considered.
The real argument is about what is best, what individuals can do or what communities can do; what makes people feel safer and free-er (hard to do at once darn it) and about who is doing what, allegedly for principle or for the public but really for motives both selfish and short-sighted. And to some extent it’s about who is in charge, and whose ideological psychic security blanket is catered to. In other words, it’s a normal political controversy.
What is new is that climate is obviously an area for which, should it seem necessary to make political decisions, it will be hard to do it, for the issue is closer to global than most; we have no generally agreed means of making such decisions, and it could be a bad idea if we did (what would compete with or limit such a decision-making process? People from Mars or Sirius?) And so everyone turns to “facts” to try to get something agreed without facing any of the real issues at all. Not going to work.
But more power to the fact-researchers, the more people know about an issue, the greater the odds of rational and peaceable action.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
