March 1, 2010--"I Hope You Don’t Do A Piece On That Lame Al Gore Global Warming Op-Ed in The NYT"
I received this plea in an e-mail from a close friend who is a conservative of the libertarian kind. One who believes in gay rights, a woman's right to have an abortion, and a host of other good things. But about global warming we strongly disagree. I love this guy, I really do, and know him well enough to think that he sent me this note not to deter me to write about the Al Gore op-ed piece linked below but to provoke me, to bait me to do so. In order for us to have more things to fight about!
So here goes.
We agree that global warming is occurring. But not about why. He contends that it is because of natural geological and atmospheric phenomena, the kind we know, from the fossil record, that has gone on for many millennia. For billions of years before humans evolved and way, way before we burned coal and oil or had ozone-depleting aerosol cans.
I contend that indeed there are these tectonic kinds of forces that have in the past caused global warming so intense that what is now the Arctic was a tropical rain forest and ice ages so prolonged and frigid that there were glaciers in what is now Central Park in New York City. All long before human existence. And that they will continue for as long as there is an earth.
But, unlike my friend, along with virtually all earth scientists, I see overwhelming evidence that humans are one factor, repeat--one factor adding to the warming that we now see melting glaciers, the polar ice caps, and generally warming the oceans.
In his view, since the basic global-warming science is flawed at best and fraudulent at worst, and what we see is occurring beyond any form of human control, we should not distort our economy via cap-and-trade kinds of policies in order to reduce our carbon footprint. Further, consistent with his conservative ideology, he does not want to see what he claims to be manipulated concerns about human contributions to global warming justifying more government intervention in our lives. As he said one morning over coffee, "I don't want the government telling me which car to drive."
I say back to him that, yes, there have been some shabby studies; but these have been relatively few in the larger spectrum of scientific evidence, and that even if all the careless science is thrown out--as it should be--there is so much reliable, independent, and non-ideological evidence that we are in fact contributing (underline contributing) to warming that we should do all we can to reduce that contribution. Nothing less than our lives and global future are at stake.
Al Gore is the conservatives' favorite political pinata. They just love to make fun of him as one more way to undermine the weight of the real science that should concern us all. He is as easy to caricature as Dick Cheney and Sarah Palin. So I suppose, fair is fair.
But even if we toss Al Gore out of the argument, which I am OK doing (he is no more a scientist than those my friend cites on the other side of the argument--aviation pioneer Burt Rutan and medical doctor and novelist Michael Crichton), there are so many reliable and dispassionate studies that make the case that humans are part (underline part) of the problem as to make the preponderance of evidence incontrovertible. And thus humans have to be part of the solution.
Actually, the Al Gore op-ed is pretty moderate. He acknowledges the bad science and the mistakes and the manipulations; but, as I am asserting, he also claims the evidence is overwhelming and that some sort of carbon tax is at the moment the best way to proceed. True, it would be costly and painful but to do nothing or wait decades for a less intrusive "solution" would only contribute to the crisis. And a crisis it is. The last decade, for example, was the hottest in recorded history.
My friend says we shouldn't do all sorts of controversial and expensive things until the science, in his word, is "settled." But when I say back to him that the nuclear science wasn't settled when we embarked upon the Manhattan Project (one of conservatives favorite government programs), he doesn't have anything much to say back to me.
Nor did he the other day respond to the list of hundreds of studies I sent him from independent scientists and academic organizations that reviewed the evidence and make the case about the many and varied ways in which we contribute to global warming. A list, by the way, that included many of the most credible critics. I challenged him to read through them and then get back to me as I have read and reacted to the stuff he sent me from Rutan and Crichton. But thus far I haven't received a response.
Perhaps that's why he provoked me to write this. So he can respond in public. It would be fun to tussle with him here.
So here goes.
We agree that global warming is occurring. But not about why. He contends that it is because of natural geological and atmospheric phenomena, the kind we know, from the fossil record, that has gone on for many millennia. For billions of years before humans evolved and way, way before we burned coal and oil or had ozone-depleting aerosol cans.
I contend that indeed there are these tectonic kinds of forces that have in the past caused global warming so intense that what is now the Arctic was a tropical rain forest and ice ages so prolonged and frigid that there were glaciers in what is now Central Park in New York City. All long before human existence. And that they will continue for as long as there is an earth.
But, unlike my friend, along with virtually all earth scientists, I see overwhelming evidence that humans are one factor, repeat--one factor adding to the warming that we now see melting glaciers, the polar ice caps, and generally warming the oceans.
In his view, since the basic global-warming science is flawed at best and fraudulent at worst, and what we see is occurring beyond any form of human control, we should not distort our economy via cap-and-trade kinds of policies in order to reduce our carbon footprint. Further, consistent with his conservative ideology, he does not want to see what he claims to be manipulated concerns about human contributions to global warming justifying more government intervention in our lives. As he said one morning over coffee, "I don't want the government telling me which car to drive."
I say back to him that, yes, there have been some shabby studies; but these have been relatively few in the larger spectrum of scientific evidence, and that even if all the careless science is thrown out--as it should be--there is so much reliable, independent, and non-ideological evidence that we are in fact contributing (underline contributing) to warming that we should do all we can to reduce that contribution. Nothing less than our lives and global future are at stake.
Al Gore is the conservatives' favorite political pinata. They just love to make fun of him as one more way to undermine the weight of the real science that should concern us all. He is as easy to caricature as Dick Cheney and Sarah Palin. So I suppose, fair is fair.
But even if we toss Al Gore out of the argument, which I am OK doing (he is no more a scientist than those my friend cites on the other side of the argument--aviation pioneer Burt Rutan and medical doctor and novelist Michael Crichton), there are so many reliable and dispassionate studies that make the case that humans are part (underline part) of the problem as to make the preponderance of evidence incontrovertible. And thus humans have to be part of the solution.
Actually, the Al Gore op-ed is pretty moderate. He acknowledges the bad science and the mistakes and the manipulations; but, as I am asserting, he also claims the evidence is overwhelming and that some sort of carbon tax is at the moment the best way to proceed. True, it would be costly and painful but to do nothing or wait decades for a less intrusive "solution" would only contribute to the crisis. And a crisis it is. The last decade, for example, was the hottest in recorded history.
My friend says we shouldn't do all sorts of controversial and expensive things until the science, in his word, is "settled." But when I say back to him that the nuclear science wasn't settled when we embarked upon the Manhattan Project (one of conservatives favorite government programs), he doesn't have anything much to say back to me.
Nor did he the other day respond to the list of hundreds of studies I sent him from independent scientists and academic organizations that reviewed the evidence and make the case about the many and varied ways in which we contribute to global warming. A list, by the way, that included many of the most credible critics. I challenged him to read through them and then get back to me as I have read and reacted to the stuff he sent me from Rutan and Crichton. But thus far I haven't received a response.
Perhaps that's why he provoked me to write this. So he can respond in public. It would be fun to tussle with him here.
posted by Steven Zwerling at
5:50 AM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
Subscribe to Post Comments [Atom]
<< Home