Muddling the Issue

Unfortunately, climate skeptics further muddle the issue by hurling “boy cried wolf” accusations. Scientists have been wrong in the past, they say, so why should we believe them now? They’ll point to the once-held belief that earth would be entering an Ice Age, as an example. But was this really a widely-held beliefs by scientists? It doesn’t seem like it. British Arctic Survey climate modeler William Connelly refutes the global cooling myth here: http://www.realclimate.org/index.php?p=94. In any case, the accusation is a non-sequitur. Science is a cumulative endeavor; as new measurement techniques are developed, more accurate data can be gathered and errors can be corrected. We can only act on the data we have, and so far, that data has for some time consistently pointed to a human-caused global warming trend.

The biggest muddling, though, comes from climate skeptics accusing environmentalists of being anti-business. We’ve heard it from President Bush and others how trying to do something about global warming will cost jobs, will cost too much, will destroy business as we know it. So not only is global warming a conspiracy against truth, it’s a conspiracy against business itself. But history doesn’t support this blatant attempt at character assassination. From a technological standpoint, we have more than the fundamentals of creating sustainable technologies: the diesel engine was originally designed to run on vegetable oil, and electric cars came a long way before being strangely abandoned in favor of hybrids and as yet insubstantial hydrogen fuel cell technology. And business and industry have shown themselves capable of change. As Al Gore pointed out, industry successfully re-engineered itself when it became known that CFCs were creating a hole in the ozone layer. And how about how quickly the food industry turned itself around to capitalize on the Atkins diet craze, and how it is transforming itself again now that trans fats are known to be harmful?

What’s lacking is the will to implement change, because large short-term profits blind businesses to the value of sustainable, long-term profitability. (Think Big Oil.) That is the reason why legislation is seen as necessary. If businesses won’t do the right thing on their own, then they will forced to do by other means. As for the developing world, isn’t there a business opportunity? Couldn’t some smart entrepreneur develop a business around developing and supplying eco-friendly technologies that will build these countries out of poverty and related issues?

The ultimate irony in all of this is that environmentalists have greater confidence in business and industry’s ability to innovate solutions to curb global warming (and find ways to make money in the process) than these oh-so-pro-business climate skeptics.