Good for the New York Times’ Justin Gillis and Leslie Kaufman for this passage in a story about the leaked Heartland Institute documents detailed their plans to discredit science teachers: “Heartland’s latest idea, the documents say, is a plan to create a curriculum for public schools intended to cast doubt on mainstream climate science and budgeted at $200,000 this year. The curriculum would claim, for instance, that ‘whether humans are changing the climate is a major scientific controversy.’ It is in fact not a scientific controversy. The vast majority of climate scientists say that emissions generated by humans are changing the climate and putting the planet at long-term risk, although they are uncertain about the exact magnitude of that risk.” →
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Good for the NYT. Those who don’t believe that the planet is warming worry me more than those who don’t believe in evolution. However isn’t the real problem with global warming research is while humans do cause global warming, it is impossible to say by how much? There could be a natural warming going on as well. We could stop all greenhouse gases and the planet could continue to warm. That reduction would come at a massive cost to world in energy and food production.
I don’t argue that putting greenhouse gases in the atmosphere is bad for the planet. It’s a cost/benefit equation of significantly curtailing man’s activity that has yet to be proven to do more good then harm. We could limit coal plants tomorrow if we started to be serious about nuclear power but that seems unlikely. Solar, wind and other alternatives are not serious replacements yet and may take decades to get there, if ever.
If you think global warming is bad and have no solution to replace the enegy production that is lost then you’ve only gone halfway to solving the problem
Solar, wind, and other alternatives WILL take too long “to get there” if there’s no political will to encourage that research and those industries, and it’s hard to summon that political will when oil-money-worshipping right-wingers spread misinformation about climate change.
Another leftwing op-ed masquerading as news in the NYT. Hey, how ’bout that.
The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences published a study in 2010, “Expert credibility in climate change,” that found that 97% of climate researchers, as measured by the theses of the papers that they’ve published, support the tenets of anthropogenic climate change outlined by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Or, as the Times put it in this article, “the vast majority of climate scientists say that emissions generated by humans are changing the climate.” There’s no debate about this.