Dear Global Warming Skeptics:
I have a confession to make: I don’t understand you. I don’t understand why the scientific consensus is unpersuasive to you. I especially don’t understand the anger and contempt directed towards environmentalists in general and advocates like Al Gore in particular. But I do want to understand where you’re coming from because the quality of our environment requires honest, open discussions between people with different perspectives, especially since there are difficult choices to be made.
So let me begin with a friendly wager. I’ll offer two related premises, and I’d like you to agree that if you accept the first, you’ll grant credibility to the second. In return, if you don’t agree with that first premise, then I promise not to get upset if you choose not to read any further and go do something that interests you more. Deal?
Suppose I were to offer you the keys to your favourite sports car and a sweet track to drive it on. You’d take it for a spin, right? Now suppose that before giving you the car, I were to shut all the windows and doors, and connect the tailpipe to the cabin. Would you still drive it? I suspect not. A car’s exhaust is toxic, and you wouldn’t want to breathe it. That’s my first premise.
The second is simply an extension of the first: We know that millions of cars on the road have been (and still are) spewing that same toxic exhaust we wouldn’t want to breathe. We see icky smog in the sky. We see coal plants fume. We have over a hundred years of Industrial Revolution to look back on. So, given my first premise, why is it so hard to accept that, through sheer numbers, we are having a destructive effect on the environment on a global scale? If you took my wager fairly, then you have to accept that there is nothing counter-intuitive about climate change. Global warming, as a concept, isn’t far-fetched given what we know about our relationship to the environment in general. Of course, just because something makes sense in an abstracted sense doesn’t make it true. But this is where science comes in. And the science says: global warming is a serious threat.
Scam? What Scam?
Yet somehow I sense that I still haven’t persuaded you. That’s understandable, I suppose. My little wager could, to my great horror, come across as condescending – just as this entire letter might. It’s not my intention to be condescending, though. I just think it’s important to dispel the misconceptions about global warming that are preventing us from tackling the hard problems and doing what we need to do.
In past columns (see here http://www.thefrontpageonline.com/articles1-2711 and here http://www.thefrontpageonline.com/articles1-2712), I’ve addressed the view that mitigating global warming would be bad for business. But the big beef these days seems to be that Al Gore is a crackpot, environmentalists are alarmist charlatans, and that global warming is a giant scam. In message boards, I’ve seen skeptics say that the global warming orthodoxy is enforced through the granting of grants and the hiring of good little dog researchers. This doesn’t make sense, though. Science is a competitive, peer-reviewed process that, while imperfect from time to time, is nonetheless excellent at separating bad science from good science, achieving evidence-backed consensus, and moving the sum total of human knowledge forward. And academia is quite different from other human endeavours, such as business, in how it functions. I simply don’t understand where the scam is, or even how the scam would work, and have seen no explanation or evidence that climate scientists around the world colluded in foisting false science on an unsuspecting public.
There is ample evidence, however, of a scam perpetrated by so-called skeptics. In 2005, Mother Jones revealed (http://www.motherjones.com/news/feature/2005/) how ExxonMobil fund think-tanks whose goal is to denounce global warming by discrediting the scientific consensus. That’s right, ExxonMobil, which posted (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/) $40 billion in profit in 2007. $40 billion! Now there’s a conflict of interest. So let’s play the credibility game again: record profit-making oil companies or scientists and academics from around the world? For my part, I’ll stick with the scientists.
But what I’m really getting at is this: what is your standard of evidence? Where does the burden of proof lie? Is it a question of messenger? If so, what do we make of this:
“…America's commitment to the United Nations Framework Convention and its central goal, to stabilize atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations at a level that will prevent dangerous human interference with the climate. Our immediate goal is to reduce America's greenhouse gas emissions relative to the size of our economy.”
That’s not Al Gore; that’s President Bush in a February 2002 speech. And while the Bush Administration can be said to be paying lip service to climate change, not to mention politicizing the science, lip service is arguably better than outright denial. http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2002/
If it’s not about having the right messenger deliver the message, then what is it about? In other words, what will it take to make the case for global warming?
Frédérik invites you to join him at MySpace and read his blog.