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Politics : Politics of Energy
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To: Brumar89 who wrote (3606)12/21/2008 3:40:25 PM
From: Sam  Read Replies (2) of 86356
 
Let me add something here. The history of science replete with people who were declared quacks or mad and later turned out to be right. Consider the case of Ignaz Semmelweis, who made one of the most important discoveries of the past two centuries and was ridiculed by his contemporaries for his belief that simply washing hands would reduce maternal mortality rates. Cf en.wikipedia.org
for the details. Even this poor man's wife thought he was going mad. Alfred Wegener was ridiculed for the theory of continental drift when he first proposed it. As I'm sure you know, Louis Agassiz was ridiculed when he first proposed the existence of widespread ice ages back in the 1830s. And Mihkail Budyko provoked outrage and ridicule when he proposed at a 1971 conference of leading climatologists that human beings could and were affecting the environment by fossil fuel emissions. See aip.org for details of the meeting.

So I am not insensitive to the claim that the scientific establishment can sometimes be drastically wrong. I don't automatically dismiss such claims. However, what is different about this case is that the current theories about CO2 and whether or not humans can have an effect on the atmosphere have already been dismissed by the establishment in the past but wouldn't go away. These claims have been the subject of intensive investigation and debate almost ever since Budyko presented his paper back in '71. It isn't some hairbrained scheme, it isn't simply the idea of one or two or even a dozen crackpots. It isn't limited to scientists in one field or one school of thought or one country or even one culture. It has been hotly debated, and the evidence--the empirical data and tests and the theories that try to account for those things--says what it says.

Is there a consensus that the most dire predictions about how climate will be affected by certain levels of CO2 (e.g., the 450 ppm level that has most often been mentioned)? Not that I can see. And I can't claim to be able to judge climate senstivity personally. But there is a consensus that ever larger amounts of it will lead to feedbacks that will cause bad things to happen--from the POV of most of the living creatures that are adapted to our current climate, and from the POV of human civilization as it currently exists. Now, it may be that we need a cleansing akin to what the Bible says happened in Noah's time, and should start over. But personally, I don't think things are necessarily that bad. I'd rather try to reform what we have than have to start over. And weaning our society off of carbon-based energy sources seems to be one of the necessary conditions for preventing those bad things from happening in the not all that distant future.
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