Science Concensus Overwhelming On Climate Change - New Yorker

First of three articles

EDIT

How good is the science? We often hear it said, at least in this country, that there are conflicting views.

There is a very broad consensus in the scientific community that global warming is under way. To the extent that there are conflicting views, they are usually over how exactly the process will play out. This is understandable. The climate affects just about every natural system on earth, and these systems in turn affect the climate. So making predictions is very complicated. Meanwhile, we have only one planet, so it’s impossible to run a controlled experiment. To focus on the degree of disagreement, rather than on the degree of consensus, is, I think, fundamentally misguided. If ten people told you your house was on fire, you would call the fire department. You wouldn’t really care whether some of them thought that the place would be incinerated in an hour and some of them thought it would take a whole day.

One disturbing thing about your article is just how alarmed many seemingly sober-minded scientists are. What sort of a gap is there between expert and lay opinion on climate change?

That’s a good question. I think there is a surprisingly large—you might even say frighteningly large—gap between the scientific community and the lay community’s opinions on global warming. As you point out, I spoke to many very sober-minded, coolly analytical scientists who, in essence, warned of the end of the world as we know it. I think there are a few reasons why their message hasn’t really got out. One is that scientists tend, as a group, to interact more with each other than with the general public. Another is that there has been a very well-financed disinformation campaign designed to convince people that there is still scientific disagreement about the problem, when, as I mentioned before, there really is quite broad agreement. And third, the climate operates on its own timetable. It will take several decades for the warming that is already inevitable to be felt. People tend to focus on the here and now. The problem is that, once global warming is something that most people can feel in the course of their daily lives, it will be too late to prevent much larger, potentially catastrophic changes.

If human beings have caused climate change, can we also reverse it?

We cannot reverse climate change. This is because carbon dioxide is a long-lived gas. What we do have the power to do is to mitigate climate change by reducing emissions. The longer we wait to do this, the riskier the situation will become.

Human beings have responded to challenges for millennia. For most of that time, we have had far fewer technological tools at our disposal than we have now. Why shouldn’t we be optimistic about our ability to face climate change and adapt?

I certainly hope that we can face climate change. My oldest son is ten years old and, for his sake, I would very much like to think that we will be able to cope with this challenge. It’s hard for me to be optimistic, though. Scientists have been warning about the dangers of global warming for more than twenty-five years now, and in that time we have increased our energy usage—and, with it, our production of greenhouse gases—quite dramatically. In terms of adaptation, it’s a nice idea, and certainly it will be necessary; the amount of warming that is already inevitable is quite significant and may cause severe disruptions. At a certain point, though, the changes will become so great that adaptation will become extremely difficult; a five-foot rise in sea levels, for example, would put parts of the state of Florida underwater. If you imagine that sort of scenario being played out all around the globe, it gets pretty frightening. And, as one climatologist pointed out to me, while we are more technologically sophisticated than earlier societies, we are also more sophisticated when it comes to destruction."

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http://www.newyorker.com/online/content/articles/050425on_onlineonly01

For Program On: Monday, April 25, 2005 at 9:00 AM (central)
Kathleen Dunn talks with a writer from the New Yorker Magazine about a three part-series on the “Realities of Global Warming.” Guest: Elizabeth Kolbert, writer for the New Yorker Magazine

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