I've said from the beginning (as in, the early '90s) that arguing about whether human activities are the (or even *a*) primary causal factor is disingenuous at best and deliberately destructive at worst.
Yes, if it turns out that things we are doing (the significant imbalance between carbon release into and capture from the environment, deforestation, marine pollution, ozone-depleting emissions) are contributing to the trend, then yeah, we should see what we can do to reduce the impact. But first arguing that climate change isn't happening, and then that people aren't causing it, and using those arguments to block significant other work on the question, has stolen decades now from our ability to plan on how we're going to react to it. Those decades of arguing are going to turn out to have killed people, maybe a lot of people.
There are many other measures of climate change--the growth of the Sahara, the shrinking of the polar ice caps, the upward trend in frequency and strength of tropical storms. But to a certain extent, even all that doesn't matter. What's important is that there are millions of people (and other species) living on the margins of potentially-affected areas, and billions of people dependent on food production that is susceptible to even fairly minor changes in temperature and (more importantly) rainfall distribution. We have to figure out how to move people out of threatened areas, and how to buffer our food production against disaster.
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Date: 2007-08-12 04:33 pm (UTC)Yes, if it turns out that things we are doing (the significant imbalance between carbon release into and capture from the environment, deforestation, marine pollution, ozone-depleting emissions) are contributing to the trend, then yeah, we should see what we can do to reduce the impact. But first arguing that climate change isn't happening, and then that people aren't causing it, and using those arguments to block significant other work on the question, has stolen decades now from our ability to plan on how we're going to react to it. Those decades of arguing are going to turn out to have killed people, maybe a lot of people.
There are many other measures of climate change--the growth of the Sahara, the shrinking of the polar ice caps, the upward trend in frequency and strength of tropical storms. But to a certain extent, even all that doesn't matter. What's important is that there are millions of people (and other species) living on the margins of potentially-affected areas, and billions of people dependent on food production that is susceptible to even fairly minor changes in temperature and (more importantly) rainfall distribution. We have to figure out how to move people out of threatened areas, and how to buffer our food production against disaster.