The Seattle Times ran a story yesterday quoting an article in the current issue of Science magazine (it costs money to read the article there) to the effect that global warming will dramatically reduce the agricultural production around the world by the end of this century. “With average growing-season temperatures expected to rise more than 6 degrees Fahrenheit, crop yields will fall 20 to 40 percent, the report estimates.” That’s a very dangerous bit of news.

What’s dangerous about it is that much of the climate-science community, certainly the political parts of it, is convinced that global warming is anthropogenic. Unfortunately, the political part so overwhelms the scientific part that we’re not likely to ever know for sure. The evidence to date is certainly far short of logical certainty, and a lot of time and effort is being spent trying to prove that the temperature swings of the past never happened. The very real possibility is that the warming is caused by the same things that caused the Medieval Climate Optimum or the warm weather that allowed the Roman Empire to thrive, in which case cutting back on our “greenhouse gas” emissions is going to do diddly squat.

If that’s the case, what we really need to do is develop strains of crops that will provide better yield at warmer temperatures. For example, scientists at the University of Washington are working on a project called “Nutritious Rice for the World”. This is a distributed-computing effort to analyze DNA sequences in rice that could lead to rice strains that will better serve a warmer planet. (I have four CPUs here running the program in the background, and tens of thousands of others are contributing CPU power to the cause as well.) That is something that could actually help.

Those who pretend that the cause of the current warming trends are known, and who sneer at those of us who are skeptical, aren’t helping. Pretending that they have a case not only endangers our future directly, it is bringing about an age when obvious logical fallacies go unrecognized and constantly repeated. I’m one who feels that having a populace that can think logically is a boon, even if it would be a real hardship to demagogues like Al Gore.

If I Were King, I would not only have a bully pulpit for pointing out widespread logical errors, but I would support efforts to prepare for changes in the climate. Given the climatic variations over the last few million years, and the fact that we are running close to the high end of the range, I’d support efforts to prepare for a bit more warming as well as the dramatic cooling that is, based on history, rather more likely.