After following climate science for three decades, I remain surprised – no, dumbfounded – that people can doubt the overwhelming scientific evidence for human-caused climate change.
Let’s face it. This subject has left the realm of science and become an all-out media war. Here are some stories to read this week.
Climate Insurance. Let’s start with the facts. This Washington Post editorial asserts that “few reputable scientists would disagree” that the world is getting warmer and that humans are at least partly the cause. It explains that climate is complex, that the evidence for human-caused climate change in this century is overwhelming, and that the errors in the data that have come to light so far are “trivial.”
The Attack on Climate-Change Science: Why It’s the O.J. Moment of the Twenty-First Century. This article by Bill McKibben is posted as a Tomgram at TomDispatch.com. McKibben wrote the book End of Nature, which may have been first book ever written about human-caused climate change for a general audience. “The campaign against climate science has been enormously clever, and enormously effective,” McKibben writes. “It’s worth trying to understand how they’ve done it.”
Climate Wars. The Guardian has cataloged all of its “Climategate” stories. You’ll find factual articles and opinion pieces – expressing a diversity of opinions – related to climate science e-mails stolen from a University of East Anglia server in late 2009. Here’s the common thread: the battle over climate data has turned into an all-out war between actual climate scientists – the men and women who studied for years to become scientists, then spent decades carefully studying climate itself – and the skeptics whose motivations are sometimes hard to understand.
Bullying, lies and the rise of right-wing climate denial. Writing from Australia, Clive Hamilton explains that that nation’s “most distinguished climate scientists have become the target of a new form of cyber-bullying aimed at driving them out of the public debate.” No matter what you think of climate science, you will be shocked by the tone of some of these emails.
By the way … EarthSky has received its own share of these very disturbing, bullying emails in recent weeks. Meanwhile, our mission is to be a voice for science, and the science on this subject is very solid – as solid as science can be. If the science changes, EarthSky will change with it. Until then, we’ll continue to interview leading scientists from among the thousands around the world whose data directly or indirectly show the facts of the matter. We live on a planet that is getting noticeably warmer. Global warming could have dire consequences for some of Earth’s billions of inhabitants, especially the poorest of us in the least developed countries. Human activities play a role in creating global warming.
I believe the subject left the “rails” in East Anglia some time ago.
Bruce, I couldn’t agree more.
I am concerned that this is all about control over who can produce goods.
I would like to sequester carbon in the soil but I am afraid I will be prevented form going on my own land because the land will be taken as a state carbon offset as in NSW Australia. Cooma farmer Peter Spencer’s 52-day hunger strike and his fight for compensation over land clearing laws that he said rendered his property unviable. A protest against environmental laws and their effects on farmers and landholders .
The purpose of the rally is to tell local people about the impact the Native Vegetation Act NSW (2003) has on their property rights and their rights to use their land.
My concern is the state will force me off my land in order to make a carbon credit that will be traded to a coal burning utility.
We expect 59 million acres to be taken out of agricultural production this way.
Henry, thank you for commenting. I know nothing about Australian politics. I can only speak from a perspective of having watched global climate science for three decades. Earth as a whole is getting warmer …
Thank you for giving us your perspective, from your part of the world.
Deborah
It is clear that humans are warming the planet. If humans do not address this issue, they will become extinct like many species before them. Unfortunately, I suspect this will be our fate. We can’t seem to pass a health-care bill in our own country much less coordinate with the rest of the world on climate change. Drastic change is needed now but only lip service is taking place.
Part of this traces back to the earlier mistake of calling the problem “global warming” in the first place. Our problem is accelerating climate change, not global temperature. Global temperature is merely an easy-to-measure symptom (and is relatively easy to obtain from paleodata as well). No doubt it is an interesting quantity. But the change in global temperature is not the problem, and never has been. The problem is that the atmosphere is a forced fluid flow, and relatively small changes in the forcing can have very large changes in the flow as a consequence.
by Michael Tobis
http://theenergycollective.com/TheEnergyCollective/49963
http://www.nowtoronto.com/news/story.cfm?content=173823
Leading the char
BIOCHAR IS BLACK MAGIC, OUR CLIMATE SAVIOUR
BY WAYNE ROBERTS
Weather or not,, there are good reasons for farmers to use biochar
By the way I am in the US Illinois. Where we expect 59 million acres to be taken out of agricultural production to become forest.