This week’s edition of Newsweek has a special report on Leadership & the Environment. It’s nice to see such a prominent, mainstream magazine get it right. There is way too much politics involved in this “debate” and it is obscuring the real science. I still hear people, usually ones impacted by energy companies or big business, say that global warming isn’t real or isn’t anthropogenic (man-made) and it really irks me.
All the serious scientists and all the real, peer-reviewed work says that global warming is happening and that it is anthropogenic. The only real debate happening is around what we can do about it. Newsweek’s article makes the valid point that to get everyone behind fixing the problem; we have to make energy produced by the burning of fossil fuels more expensive than renewable energy and we have to apply the changes worldwide. Until you do that, people in general will continue to use energy that is helping to cause global warming.
There are some serious efforts under way to apply technologies to remove CO2 from the atmosphere and sequester it underground or in the deep ocean (below a certain level, it sinks instead of rises). I have hopes that our ability to apply technology will yet save us (I did a master’s thesis on Technological Mitigation Options to Anthropogenic Global Warming which evaluated many of the potential technologies we might apply (and no, Ethenol isn’t one of them). But, we need to get the federal government behind the changes. Right now, they are being implemented piecemeal by individual states (e.g. CA) and cities (e.g. Seattle), but these won’t be sufficient. This will take a worldwide, concerted effort.
I have actually heard some fundamentalist Christian people say that we don’t really need to worry about global warming because the second coming is happening soon and so the health of the planet won’t really matter much longer. This is at the heart of the difference between Humanism and some religious people (not necessarily the religions). We believe that we all have to lead a reasonable, sustainable life without reliance on faith or a potential afterlife. There is no way they can know for sure when (if ever) the second coming will happen, so how can they say we don’t need to worry about the planet. Do they really want to leave this mess to their kids to figure out? It is frustrating to see such blind stupidity contribute to the planet’s man-made sickness.
With magazines like Newsweek printing a fairly accurate view of global warming, I’m hoping more of the general public gets behind serious change.
If you want to look at discussions between real climate scientists about the subject, try http://realclimate.org.
