But recently, I’ve found three very convincing reasons which convinced me that I need to exercise in a gym (as an example, run on a treadmill):

1) Running on a treadmill, unlike running on a track, uses electricity. This helps cycle the electrons through our power grid and helps release greenhouse gases into the atmosphere—I’m not just warming myself up, but I’m warming up the earth, too!

2) Running on a treadmill, unlike, well, not running, helps me breathe out more carbon dioxide. As everyone knows, carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas that we have in our atmosphere only in minuscule amount (some hundred parts per million), and everyone needs to do their part to increase it.

Anyways. I guess it’s good thing RSF is open at 6 a.m. I mean it doesn’t help so much since it is still relatively full even at that hour, but at least when I’m out of RSF, I don’t see too many people walking around at 7 a.m.—I just hate people so much.

At this point, there was every reason to think that running other problems through these increasingly powerful machines would yield useful results. That was the thinking that led Forrester to collaborate with the Club of Rome in the early 1970s. They devised a model of planetary resources that considered a variety of interconnected dynamic systems and global scenarios — death rates, birth rates, natural-resource depletion, population density, capital investment, crowding, pollution, etc. They fed the model into a large MIT mainframe and flipped the switch.

Forrester’s partners published the results in the 1972 bestseller Limits to Growth. They predicted a rapidly growing global population combining with rapid resource depletion to spark violent social upheaval. Limits to Growth suggested that disasters and die-offs were imminent, and that the survivors would live in a world of misery and scarcity.

Well, in fairness to climatologists (unlike Scientologists, I think they deserve some respect), their models are not completely wrong—and they are not trying to model something as complex as a human, only the amount of CO₂ generated by one and the effect of the released “toxin”.

In fact, Prof. Muller says that he trusts the latest computer models—at least as much as he trusts the back-of-the-envelope calculation performed about 100 years ago, which happens to agree with the latest computer models. (Colloquium webcast. It’s a good talk; abstract here.)

Of course, if the current calculation is only as accurate as what they could do without computers 100 years ago, then it goes without saying that we haven’t made much improvements in that area, i.e. the calculation is not complete garbage, but it ain’t gospel either.

In case you don’t want to listen through Prof. Muller’s talk at the colloquium two weeks ago, here’s the scientific consensus on global warming: (1) warming is real, there is overall rise in global temperature, at least up until 2000 or so; (2) the hypothesis that natural causes (solar activity, etc. anything but CO₂ levels) alone are responsible for the warming is excluded within 90% confidence level, i.e. outside that 10% chance, human activities probably contributed to, although is not solely responsible for, global warming seen in the 20th century.

Aside from these, I don’t know any other broad, data-backed scientific consensus on climate change. Anything more dire you hear is probably either a politician or a scientist (or both) trying to scare you into action.