AJC.com > Opinion > Woman to Woman > Archives > 2007 > October > 13
Saturday, October 13, 2007
Is science or politics leading the global warming debate?
Shaunti Feldhahn, a right-leaning columnist, writes the commentary this week and Andrea Cornell Sarvady, a left-leaning columnist, responds.
Rebuttal
By driving around in a hybrid car, my colleague makes an admirable decision, one that constantly reminds her of priorities in a time of environmental crisis. Shaunti is also perceptive in wanting scientists to “work free of political expectations.”
If only the White House felt the same way. Instead, a congressional hearing entitled “Allegations of Political Interference with the Work of Climate Change Scientists” detailed years of obfuscation. In censoring scientists and touting industry-funded skeptics like Dr. Moore, the administration has conducted a systematic campaign to confuse the American people.
“There is a debate as to whether it’s man made or naturally caused,” the president declared of global warming just last year. Such pronouncements create media buzz around a scientific controversy that doesn’t exist, encouraging us to accept White House inaction.
Fortunately, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is immune to such manipulations. It backed up scientists at the EPA, NASA and other federal agencies with an emphatic report that underscored the lack of real debate. Over 2,500 of the world’s leading scientists stated that it is “very likely,” over a 90 percent probability, that human activity has caused most of the temperature rise.
My colleague is right to drive a hybrid; I’m inspired by her choice. Yet I can’t ride along with her depiction of climate experts cowering in their labs, terrified of bucking Al Gore. Scientists love to disprove common theories; in their world, that’s a career maker. Ever met a scientist? The words “hesitant” and “embarrassed” don’t exactly spring to mind.
No, the hesitancy is the Bush administration’s, years after the Kyoto Protocol, still refusing to offer up anything but the most voluntary programs. The embarrassment is ours as the world wonders why a country responsible for 25 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions does so little to forestall a nightmare.
Forget about politics? Good idea. Only then will we accept that pain-free cures aren’t going to pay us a surprise visit, here in the waiting room.
Instead, check out the lab down the hall. There you’ll find real scientists, working on real solutions. Unafraid and undaunted, they’re eager to tell us the truth.
Commentary
By Shaunti Feldhahn
Let me say right up front that I deeply appreciate Al Gore’s efforts to wake up the public about carbon emissions and global warming. I confess my husband and I had avoided watching An Inconvenient Truth until my ardent Democrat parents cornered us with it. The message affected us so much, we bought a hybrid car a week later.
And it’s because the issue is so grave that I’m even more concerned about how political it has become. Scientists must continue to investigate global warming from every angle. And yet, the co-founder of Greenpeace, ecologist and consultant Dr. Patrick Moore warned in an interview that it has gotten so politicized that many scientists are hesitant “to do their duty as a scientist - which is to challenge thinking and predictions.”
Over the last year, highly respected researchers have been stunned to be attacked for quite reasonable statements - such as that different computer models would dramatically change Gore’s predictions. How rigorously will global warming research be pursued, if scientists know in advance that they’ll be embarrassed to share unexpected findings?
Few scientists dispute that CO2 levels are at dangerous levels and rising due to emissions - but there is still deep disagreement on whether it is the primary cause of climate change, and what to do about it. For example, Dr. Moore’s research puts him at odds with his former agency, by showing that using more wood instead of steel, replacing the forests, and even using more nuclear power is better for climate health than the rigid forest-protection advocated by many environmentalists.
And in just one of many climate-change theories, fjord-bed core tests have found a fascinating correlation of climate change with sunspot cycles. According to a Financial Post article by leading Canadian geoscientist R. Timothy Patterson, solar scientists predict that a weak sunspot cycle in 2020 will propel us into an extended period of global cooling - and that governments must immediately prepare for global cooling, to avoid a serious disruption to agriculture.