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Don't Let Public Squabbling Be an Action Distraction
The Obama administration’s early leadership on global warming seems to have stirred up the climate skeptics, cynics and deniers again. Now they’re trying to discredit not only climate science, but the climate scientists the president appointed to advise him.
But when it comes to what President Obama, Congress and the rest of us should be doing, none of the squabbling matters. Outside our laboratories and classrooms and scientific journals, the chronic arguments about global warming have very little to do with the fundamental challenge ahead: Making the fastest possible transition to a green economy.
Why? Because climate change is an issue where you don’t have to agree on the problem to agree on the solutions.
First, some background on the latest media debate.
The Washington Post allowed George Will to waste some perfectly good ink to argue that Obama’s science advisors are "dark green doomsayers." The New York Times followed suit, publishing a column by John Tierney, who featured a book by Roger Pielke, a researcher at the University of Colorado who says some climate scientists are engaging in "stealth issue advocacy."
He singles out Obama science adviser John Holdren. Pielke also has blasted the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. While other critics have said the IPCC is too conservative in its assessment of the seriousness of climate change, Pielke has posted a piece on his web site accusing the IPCC of being more about politics than science. He writes:
The IPCC is actually a relatively small group of individuals who are using the IPCC process to control what policymakers and the public learn about climate on multi-decadal time scales.
Next came Andy Revkin of the Times in a news analysis titled “In the Debate on Climate Change, Exaggeration is a Common Pitfall.” Citing what he called fact problems in Will’s column and in a slide recently shown by Al Gore, Revkin writes:
In the effort to shape the public’s views on global climate change, hyperbole is an ever-present temptation on all sides of the debate. … The events illustrate the fine line that advocates on all sides walk – and sometimes cross – in using science to bolster their arguments over what should or should not be done about global warming.
But while public battles between the titans and sub-titans of media and science may be entertaining – it’s a kind of brainiack wrestlemania with politicians, pundits, pseudo-scientists, amateur climatologists, professional contrarians and paid witnesses all climbing into the ring – the battles are largely a distraction from action.
There are at least two reasons we shouldn’t let the debate delay aggressive national policies and investments that reduce carbon emissions.
The first is the well-known Precautionary Principle. It was either Gore or Arnold Schwarzenegger, I believe, who explained the Precautionary Principle with this analogy: Suppose your daughter is sick. You take her to 10 doctors. Nine of them diagnose cancer; the tenth disagrees. Do you treat her for cancer? Responsible parents would say yes. We can argue about the prognosis, we can differ on our estimate of how quickly the cancer is progressing, but we need to treat it.
The second reason is what we might call the Wealth of Benefits Principle, the basis of my statement that you don’t have to believe in climate change to accept that taking action is a great idea. The prescription for fighting global warming – a shift from fossil fuels to low- and no-carbon energy – has so many benefits that we’d have to be misanthropes, anthropomaniacs or Armageddonites to argue against it.
To illustrate, take this test: Do any of the following appeal to you?
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© InsideClimate News |
Interesting points
At what point in our history did we ever send troops over to a country to take their oil? That has never, ever been done despite the claims from people that said oil was the entire reason for the invasions of Irag. Neither of those invasions seems to have done anything at all the help temper the cost of fuel so that particular point is pretty obviously just something thrown in to be inflammatory.
Precautionary
IF there is a chance Iran may produce nuclear weapons, instead of electricity and then destroy NYC and Chicago, shouldn't we use the same principle and make sure they don't do that, because they probably will when we are driving all our cars on "pixie dust" and they have no more income from their ONLY resource. Just a thought.
Not Really
I'm not sure that qualifies as a thought. It debases the idea of thinking. It is closer to being a paranoid delusion than a thought.
Yeah Right
Temps have been flat for over a decade and we are told just to ignore all this stuff, such as if we even have a problem or even could have a problem. Let's all just live in a Utopia. The list is a joke, especially #13, since most all "green" industry is overseas. Of course, I'm sure that is solved too. You have solved everything. Only burdening people with stealth taxes and crushing economic growth. Btw, please don't tell me windmills are going to provide all that power to charge those "polluting" 400 pound time bombs used in electric vehicles.
THere is NO alternative fuel to oil...period, not for the foreseeable future. Only a small portion of it can possibly be replaced and at great cost to land and food supplies and massive uses of fuel to create "clean" fuel, which is NOT really clean.
Sane people would be a lot more open to improving the environment if they weren't insulted by being told that coke "fizz" is going to destroy the Earth. The entire global warming scam defies any sense of logic or common sense. Telling someone the earth has warmed by an AVERAGE of 1 degree over a 100 years with the vast difference is locations and technologies, is astounding. It makes as much sense as telling people what the average grade of all the world's children is and how it's different than 100 years ago or the average world income. A couple Bill Gates and Warren Buffetts wreck that assumption.
Stop acting if American people are all total fools and absolute idiots. There will be a huge political price to pay for those that would saddle us with this hoax.
They call it pollution...
....we call it Coke fizz.
There's a denier ad campaign in that.
Well said
Couldn't agree more. The point of my 2006 piece "Yelling Fire on a Hot Planet" (easy to search out). Despite all best intentions, I wrote a flawed story the other day. Welcome to newspapering 24/7. As in climate science, with climate journalism trajectory counts even as we all try to do the best we can. Here's more (no yelling yet):
http://tinyurl.com/dotIPCCembers2
http://tinyurl.com/dotAlleyRam
Thanks for the gracious
Thanks for the gracious response, Andy. In trying to stay abreast of this issue -- both the science and the debate -- it's difficult not to stumble from time to time. For example, Roger Pielke tells me that the quote I attributed to him about the IPCC actually was a statement by his father. My apologies to Dr. Pielke Jr. Onward.
The Precautionary Principle
The Precautionary Principle only makes sense when the cost of action is low enough given the uncertainty involved in predicting the future costs. People who claim that they know what the future costs and/or benefits will be have no more credibility than an astrologer who also uses the trappings of 'science' to dress up what is nothing more that an wild-a** guess.
Wealth of Benefits Principle also makes no sense because of nothing can match the energy density of fossil fuels which means alternate forms of energy will always cost more (most likely significantly more). These increased costs for energy will permeate our society and leave everyone poorer.
Now accepting a poorer society and the greater human suffering that will inevitably come with it would be a reasonable price to pay if we knew what the future would hold. The problem is we don't know and given those uncertainties we cannot justfy imposing suffering on people today to deal with a hypothetical risk. The best we can do is invest in alternate energy sources and hope we find something that works as well as fossil fuels.
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