Friday, December 4, 2009
I'm getting a lot of mail asking where I stand on climate change. You're
entitled to know. But first, I've gotta own up: I'm not a climate
scientist. I rely on information gathered and interpreted by other scientists, everybody does. My source on climate is the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) established
by the United Nations in 1988, soon after I began writing WN. Along with most scientists, I concluded that anthropogenic warming is real and dangerous; 20 years later I still
do. If warming is caused by human activity, and we have taken no steps to
modify our behavior, the result will be catastrophic. A long-term solution calls for two changes throughout society: higher efficiency and lower fertility. If warming turns out not to
be caused by humans, we will still have left our progeny with a better world.
Last week someone broke into the e-mail files of the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, and posted the results on the web for the world to see. The Wall Street
Journal and Investors Business Daily are having a field-day writing about "criminal conspiracy" and "scientific blacklisting." There were a few embarrassing comments about global
warming deniers in a mountain of e-mails. I would hate to see some of my private e- mails on the web. The suffix was added to invite comparisons to the infamous break-in at the
Watergate Hotel by Nixon's goons, but in this
story the unnamed burglars are treated as heroes. No one wrote even a
line about what was probably the only criminal offense in this sordid
affair: hacking into private files. There are angry demands in Congress
for an investigation of the affair. So far the only effect has been to
shift the focus away from bad news about rising oceans and stranded polar bears to climate scientists more interested in scoring points than advancing science. All that's left is to
figure out who paid for the break- in. That book has already been written.
When the ClimateGate story broke I immediately began digging through piles of paper on my desk to find my copy of "Doubt Is Their Product: How Industry's Assault on Science Threatens
Your Health," a 2008 book by David Michaels, an epidemiologist at the George Washington University School of Public Health. When scientific evidence of a threat to public health becomes
overwhelming, government intervention can still be delayed for years by simply manufacturing uncertainty. That's where the global warming debate is right now. The fossil fuel
industry is doing a job on us.
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