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Dave Narby asks:

"Is the brightening of Neptune supposed to confirm or disprove solar caused global warming? It's not clear to me from what you've written."

Dave, my point is that that scientific understanding is always evolving. It's the best we have, but it is never perfect. Yet people who look at things through political lenses tend to overstate things, no matter which side of the issue that they find themselves on. I called attention to the article to demonstrate this evolution of scientific understanding, not to take sides.

In this case, the study gives an interesting suggestion that there may be some solar factors in play that we need to understand. But the authors note that their hypothesis is still tentative. As a scientist, it's the kind of paper I love to read, because it suggests we can learn more by pursuing research in the directions the authors suggest.

In the political battle, however, some people have seized on the abstract of this article to deny anthropogenic contributions to global warming, even though the article explicitly acknowledges them.

On the other side of the political battle, some people have been so strident in their emphasizing of human causes that they make it seem as if science has ruled out all other causes. That's also a distortion.

Note that I am describing political positions not scientific ones here.

In the middle are the scientists who try to keep politics out of their work. They say let's look at everything and try to make sense of it. Their current consensus is very persuasive, and that is that the world is warming and human contributions are, to a high degree of certainty, the dominant cause.

The political point of my posting is that we need to take a less polarized and more honest view of the science in developing policy. We have a global problem to solve, and it appears that human activities are responsible for most of it. Let's consider the consensus view and scenarios on either side of it to formulate policies that are most likely to lead to beneficial changes in way people, corporations, and governments act.

While the policy-makers do their work, the scientists need to continue to illuminate the problem and communicate their findings to society at large.

This paper simply says that we might want to consider some previously undiscovered factors in climate change, even though human causes are dominant. Without the political context, it would get very little attention beyond planetary scientists like Heidi Hammel.

See www.fredbortz.com/HammelBio/ to learn more about her and her work.

And see www.scienceshelf.com/StormWorld.htm to discover an interesting upcoming book that addresses how scientists and their work can be affected by a climate of political polarization.

Fred Bortz
Science and technology books for young readers (www.fredbortz.com)
and Science book reviews (www.scienceshelf.com)