There is an interview in Der Spiegel today with Lennart Bengtsson, a Swedish meteorologist who has long been thought of as a cool head about climate change. The former director of the Max Planck Institute of Meteorology in Hamburg, one of the leading climate-change research centers, he has recently decided to join an organization that is skeptical of major changes in the world’s climate. This is the Global Warming Policy Foundation, which is based in Britain. Thus he is asked why he had made such an unexpected choice. Bengtsson’s reply is worth quoting in full:

Throughout my life, I have been fascinated by predictability and frustrated by our inability to predict. I don’t believe it makes sense for our generation to believe or pretend that we can solve the problems of the future because we do not understand what these problems will be. Just do this thought experiment: imagine you’re in the month of May 1914, and try to work out a plan of action for the next hundred years! Hardly anything would make sense.

The next question in the interview and his answer turn to the most plausible response to climate change. “We must embrace new science and technology in a more positive way than we presently do in Europe,” he says. And then he turns to nuclear energy and genetically modified food, among other measures. This is where the interview ends, as well. All of this is neither here nor there, but I still appreciate his thought experiment. Just imagine you are in the month of May 1914. Your plan of action for the next hundred years would hardly make any sense today. Indeed.