Why we need climate change skeptics
Healthy is probably not the first adjective climate change skeptics would use about his position. At least that’s my conclusion given the pariah status conferred on anyone who resists the conventional wisdom that climate change is bad and caused by human activity. Skeptics have been punished, vilified, and even threatened. And some have retaliated with their own aggressive defense.
The problem is that to get people excited about a long-term, fuzzy, hard-to-solve problem like climate change requires some fervor. It is a problem in which acute pain will take over us, many times without being detected. And even when the effects are acute, they are hard to attribute. After all, they could have happened by chance anyway.
Most climate change is actually slow, and slow change is hard to prove. It is even more difficult to spend public money on gold, worse still, to implement policies that can hinder economic growth, only to further slow down already slow change.
So the solution was to speed it all up. Add some intensity and make everything immediate. Al Gore did Inconvenient Truth in this style. He creates some excitement using fear.
Only this is difficult to maintain. Momentum is easily lost when the basis of the argument is emotion rather than hard facts. Most of the time we need to be able to see it to believe it. That is why there are still a billion people in the world who end up hungry every day. If we saw poverty with our own eyes, we would soon do something about it.
Climate change is not visible. It’s a gradual change in weather patterns, perhaps a subtle frequency change in extreme events. It manifests as an earlier start to spring, a shorter-than-usual rainy season, or a few more tornadoes. But all this could happen by chance.
Skeptics become more of a nuisance in these circumstances. They inevitably want proof to be convinced of the phenomenon. This is skepticism, an open mind until there is enough evidence to make a decision either way. Alone in the climate change debate, just asking for more evidence is tantamount to treason.
Except that climate change skeptics are vital even if global warming is real and turns out to be caused by human actions.
It is vital because we need to be sure that the actions we take are meaningful.
If we must spend money to reduce emissions, slow the growth in the use of fossil fuels around the world [a huge call for all those countries with emerging economies] and take measures to adapt to climate change, then we must know that these are truly priority tasks.
They must be worth it.
Action against climate change must be more important than direct spending on poverty reduction, food security, health care, education, conflict resolution and a host of local issues.
And there will always be debate about priorities.
Just today I heard a radio talk show caller make the case that $4 million in taxpayer findings should be spent on a public swimming pool instead of more parking space at the train station. For him, the pool gave a much better public result. He’d probably have some friends among the climate change skeptics and some “what are you thinking” warm-hearted ones.
Skeptics force us to be sure that any action is the right call. It is a weak position to simply ignore or attack a detractor.
Is the author a skeptic?
Since I’ve been championing the value of skepticism, I thought I should take my own little quiz to bring myself up to speed on this topic.
Are you a climate change denier? No. I believe that climate change is real. The weather has always changed and always will.
Do you think that humans are the cause of what many see as global warming? Probably because we’ve changed the way the natural world works quite a bit. We have released carbon from vegetation and soils, and burned enough fossil fuels to have an effect on atmospheric dynamics.
Is human activity the only driver of a changing climate? Definitely not and is easily surpassed by the larger cosmic cycles. Human activity may be a climate nuisance, but we are not all-powerful.
Can humans ‘fix’ climate change? No, we can’t ‘fix’ something that isn’t broken. That being said, we should reduce our impacts, but it’s not in our power to stop climate change as much as we’d like to think we can. Instead, we should invest our intelligence and resources in managing the effects of climate change on our production systems.
So are you a climate change skeptic? Yes, I am, because I have always been cautious and in need of proof. ‘Innocent until proven guilty’ is a much more powerful way of seeking the truth than simply presuming guilt.
So far I have seen enough evidence to convince me that climate changes
I am even reasonably convinced that the human activity of the last 200 years [before then there were too few of us to really have any impact] it is enough to be a driver for more change.
But I’m skeptical about our ability to do anything about global warming for two reasons:
- we cannot agree to take consolidated action, a consequence of our innate argumentative natures
- we still have to feed, clothe and house a population of 7 billion growing at 9,000 an hour
The first is a matter of will and the second is pure pragmatism.
These realities mean that we will need skeptics to help us ensure that it is worth all the effort to get uncomfortable policies through our national and international political processes or, to put it more simply, to keep everyone honest.