The Climate Change Debate

I almost had to laugh looking through the "Friends of Science" website, it sounded so rote and simplistic. Of the two websites, I found the "How to Talk to a Climate Skeptic" one more believable - I thought it had more (complete) information and more detailed explanations for its positions - i.e., when FoS said that severe weather hadn't been increasing, the only marker they gave was tropical storms. Comparing the two, however, I was struck by the degree to which data can be manipulated to prove one point or another. For example, where FoS says that climate change isn't causing more violent weather and that the number of hurricanes has actually been decreasing since the 1970s, How to talk to a Skeptic argues that we have been seeing an increase in, if not the number of tropical storms, than at least an increase in intensity. It really is amazing how you can take a single set of numbers and come to such different conclusions.

Obviously the debate around climate change is critical. I think part of the reason it exists is that people do honestly disagree with one another about what various scientific findings could mean. I do think there exists a place in the scientific community for constructive and honest debate about what scientific findings really mean and how they can be interpreted. On a larger scale, though, I think the debate is motivated by fear - climate scientists and environmentalists spout all these doomsday prophesies about what we're doing to the Earth and what it's going to look like, and who honestly wants to believe that? On some level it might be easier to disagree with all your might than to open-mindedly face what we've done to the planet. I also think that climate skeptics seriously downplay the role of feedback loops in the planet's climate. Our Earth is a vast, complex mechanism with systems we've barely even begun to understand, and I think one of the real dangers of climate change is that it will act as a catalyst for processes we haven't even yet connected to the central issue of global warming. I also think it's incredibly difficult, given the vast amount of information (and data manipulation) that's out there, to objectively sift through findings and evaluate scientific claims. Some of the most important factors to look at, however, I think involve who's conducting the study, the strength of their research findings, if those findings have been backed by other independent studies, and what other, relatively non-partisan scientists are saying about these studies. Obviously this is a lot of work to do for every single piece of climate change evidence we come across, and it's much easier to just pick a website or newspaper we like or trust and let them inform us. Personally, I believe that climate change is real, that humans are overwhelmingly responsible for it, and that all this bickering over interpretation is really just a way for those who don't believe in it to waste the time of those who do; constructive debates certainly have a role to play, but at this point we should be arguing about solutions, not getting into petty squabbles about whether or not climate change is really happening.