An Atomic Show listener pointed me to an interesting article published in the Guardian in September 2006 titled Royal Society tells Exxon: stop funding climate change denial.
It is articles like this one that makes me put up my defenses against a headlong rush to a dogmatic belief that human activity that produces CO2 is threatening the very existence of life on earth as we know it. Here is a quote attributed to a spokesman from the Royal Society:
Mr Ward said: “It is now more crucial than ever that we have a debate which is properly informed by the science. For people to be still producing information that misleads people about climate change is unhelpful. The next IPCC report should give people the final push that they need to take action and we can’t have people trying to undermine it.”
When a group is so afraid of opposing theories and information that they feel compelled to move beyond debate and into an effort to simply keep the information quiet, I get very curious.
When someone tells me that I should not be allowed to read something, I really want to read it to find out why not. Of course, I wonder why I am taking this one on – after all, a belief in human caused climate change may help motivate support for nuclear power.
I don’t believe this is motivated by fear of opposing theories at all – those have pretty much all been aired and debated ad nauseum for the last 20 years. For instance, the sun is big, and it’s hot. Real scientists have noticed this, and figured it into their equations, don’t ya think?
If you want the scientific scoop, go to realclimate.org.
Mark:
I have visited realclimate.org on a number of occasions and find much of the material there quite reasonable and compelling.
I am not willing, however, to believe that our knowledge is complete. There is still room for research, discussion and debate. With the current political climate, there are few sources of funds for research that does not presuppose a conclusion about the impact of human CO2 emissions on the world’s climate.
There is no doubt that we are putting a lot of CO2 into the atmosphere on an absolute scale – each large coal fired power plant, for example, produces about 45,000 tons of the stuff every single day. The question that arises for those of us that can do math is what is the relative portion of this CO2 compared to all other sources.
The answer to that question can lead one to wonder about the accuracy of the scare tactics and the magnitude of our impact.
Mark, no they have not.