Oh sure, the scientific and media community has been able to throw together some numbers and change their language against statements like the latter by changing "global warming" to "climate change." ...but the threat those people pose still remains. How exactly do you deal with it when someone has a modicum of knowledge about the Earth's climate history in a larger context, one that generally does not include man? How do you handle pesky lunatics who want to point out that tens of thousands of years ago could not have been the last ice age because it was part of this ice age and, in fact, we are in what is known as an "interglacial period?"
You can try and show how insane they are for pointing at things like "evidence" and "historical data." I'm sure that's what these fine, upstanding people would say is the right course of action.
However, I would like to point out that those of us who do believe in global warming; those of us who keep the faith in spite of the evidence - because that's what it's about, after all: keeping the faith - have been focusing on the wrong thing...
You see, this is a complex problem full of complex numbers and, as everybody knows, complex numbers have two components: the real part and the imaginary part. Our problem is that we've been trying to convince people that man-made global climate change exists using real numbers and the real numbers have been very uncooperative.
What we need to start doing is helping people comprehend the threat posed by the imaginary numbers. After all, the true threat lies in the imaginary component of the evidence we have collected, rather than the real part. Let's look at a concrete example.
Let's say that last year, the global average temperature went up by 0.1°F - don't bother to fact-check, I made that up as a hypothetical. Someone could argue we have absolutely no evidence whatsoever that, when exiting an ice age, the temperature should not go up as fast as it did.
What these people don't understand is the imaginary impact of that change and the very real threat it poses. Let's take a closer look:
While, in our hypothetical example, the real component of climate change was only 0.1°F, the imaginary component could be 10i√(°F). The good news is that we have no way of measuring this number so there is no way for those "that's not what the evidence suggests" fruitcakes to show that they are completely fabricated. The bad news is that same attribute makes it so that those same nut jobs can say "because we cannot measure it, it won't have any measurable impact on our lives."
This can be resolved with the simple remedy of applying "what if;" the tool we used to generate a buzz and get people worried about
If our actual global average temperature were, say 67°F + 10i√(°F), and the imaginary portion were to be squared, the real part of our global average temperature would drop 100°F - a global catastrophe. Likewise, if the temperature started out as 67°F - 10i√(°F), the temperature would jump 100°F - killing pretty much everything everywhere.
This proves, I think, that the real threat is not global warming, weirding, or climate change but Global Sidways-ing, man-made changes to the imaginary portion of our global average temperature that could lead to very disastrous consequences if mathematics were to fundamentally change in a way that caused those imaginary numbers to become real.
