All the tactics of the deniers will not make global warming go away

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Global Warming Turns Ugly

Submitted by Peter F. Cannavo, Feb 12, 2007 11:37

All the tactics of the global warming deniers will not make the problem go away. You might find minor flaws in the research, you might proclaim skepticism about just how accurate the computer models are, you might recycle the disproven claims of skeptics, and you might resort to face-saving strategies like acknowledging climate change but then saying it's not caused by human beings. You keep talking about the need for more science. Scientists have been studying this issue for decades! The climatic changes we are seeing now were predicted back in the late 1980s, when I first started following this issue. You persist in the fantasy of some group of "real" scientists out there who know the truth but who have been silenced by their colleagues. Besides a handful of contrarians whose claims have regularly been disproved, where are they? Also, offering someone $10K to come to a predetermined conclusion about a scientific issue is very different from a research grant and is contrary to the professional ethics of the scientific community.

When they confront climate change, conservatives are sounding more and more like left-wing postmodernists. They are basically denying the inherent validity of mainstream science and saying that it is little more than the discourse of those in power.

If you want to legitimately debate the climate change issue, then acknowledge the problem, for goodness sake, and then raise the following questions: 1) Is it worthwhile to try to mitigate climate change? 2) Should we put more of our efforts into adaptation or mitigation, or into some combination of both?

The notion that trying to reduce fossil fuel emissions will throw us back into the dark ages is a canard. What about the emerging multibillion dollar industry in green technologies? What about all the economic activity and jobs generated by retrofitting buildings and transportation infrastructure with energy-saving and renewable energy technology? And, what about the security benefits of reducing our dependence on oil, which is being sold to us by such friendly nations as Iran, Venezuela, and Saudi Arabia? Without their petrodollars, the governments of these countries would be little more than tin-horn thugs.

Finally, by pumping more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, we are tinkering with an extremely complex biogeochemical system. How do you know that we are not going to trigger serious feedbacks and threshold effects that could fundamentally disrupt human civilization? You rely on the supposed comfort of scientific uncertainty, but so far the uncertainties are being resolved in ways that suggest climate change to be even more serious than anticipated.

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