climate change: a push for a more reasoned approach | essay

I like to think of myself as a rather forward-thinking fellow who’s hip to the latest intelligence on all things intelligent. So I was a little surprised a couple of years ago to find myself in the intellectual and cultural minority after watching An Inconvenient Truth and believing it was, in large part, an inconvenient waste of time.

If you haven’t seen it yet, I feel as though it’s this decade’s must-watch movie if only because so many people have seen it or at least have an opinion on it. So add it to your NetFlix queue or try to find a copy online if you haven’t managed the time to see it.

In any event, after watching Al Gore deliver his personal lecture on all things global and warm, I realized that while I admired his passion, I disagreed with him almost completely. One point I didn’t disagree with was that the planet’s climate was changing and getting warmer—this seems true by just about all scientific reasoning—but what I disagreed with that the planet would undergo a cataclysmic climate shift in only half a century. It may be surprising to those who haven’t seen the film, but Gore predicts such disaster movie scenarios as sea levels rising by enormous amounts in only fifty years, horribly flooding several states and nations. It all reminded me of those soothsayers who once predicted California would be an island by 1997 and the entire eastern seaboard flooded by the early 2000s.

In short, it was all just a little too Book Of Revelation for me, so I took a step back and tried to find some other research in order to form a reasoned opinion. It’s obvious that Gore had an agenda and I was hoping to find someone who wasn’t trying to push a certain political view. However, trying to find a dissenting opinion on global warming two years ago was akin to finding Hillary Clinton telling the truth for once in her campaign today. Nearly an impossible feat. There just weren’t any unbiased sources easily available. And those that were available were suspiciously linked to some large corporations responsible for such goodies as oil and tobacco—not quite the groups I’m keen to side with. But the lack of any unbiased publicly-accessible dissenting opinions didn’t mean they weren’t out there. It would just take some time for them to reach the mainstream after Gore had won his Nobel Peace Prize. (Whether someone who essentially delivered a politically motivated lecture using research he obtained elsewhere deserves a one million dollar prize or not is a discussion I’ll leave for another time.)

I should mention that Bjørn Lomborg had written The Skeptical Environmentalist before Gore’s film was made, but it had received such a negative reaction by so many that it seemed like the book may have been tainted as well. This was likely a misconception I had at the time, but certainly his most recent book, only published last fall, Cool It advocates I position I more closely support—that decisions on dealing with climate change should be based on science and not emotion.

But now, two years on, there is at least one website trying to provide both sides of the climate change debate. Climate Debate Daily provides updated links to articles which both support and refute global warming predictions. While there are still some iffy sources for information, a few manage to hammer home the science and don’t amp up the hysterical alarmist point of view. One piece about the snows of Kilimanjaro got my attention. Gore specifically mentions Kilimanjaro in his film and that its melting snows was a sure sign that the planet is reaching climate catastrophe. However, this is more than a little misleading. While the snows have been melting, it is in fact more to do with local forest clearing than global warming. Fewer trees in the area means less moisture in the air which inevitably leads to less snow on the mountain. While this does not conclusively prove that global warming alarmists are wrong, it does illustrate that they are comfortable using biased information in order to make their point, regardless of the real science behind it.

After reading some more articles on the climate change debate, I also discovered one man who’s actually been very outspoken on the issue and who’s used a logical, scientific process to reach his conclusions, but who wasn’t getting much serious discussion in the media. Much to my own surprise, the man was science fiction writer Michael Crichton. In 2004, Crichton wrote a book titled State Of Fear which openly questioned not so much the existence of global warming, as news reports at the time erroneously stated, but which openly questioned the predictions of people like Al Gore and other global warming alarmists. Rather than discount climate change completely or deny its anthropogenic origins, Crichton takes a more reasoned approach to global warming and claims it’s virtually impossible to predict future climate. To support his position, Crichton cites several examples of predictions over the years that have proven to be completely inaccurate. Among them: the population explosion, nuclear fallout from Chernobyl, running out of natural resources by the 1990s, and even Y2K. Many may have forgotten, but Y2K and the potential havoc it could have wrought was taken very seriously for a little while in the late ‘90s. So much so that even a United Nations report described it as one of mankind’s greatest threats.

It’s easy to laugh about these false predictions now, but they were serious concerns before we learned better. Crichton prefers to put things in a similar perspective with regard to global warming. While I haven’t read Crichton’s novel, I have watched him deliver several lectures and participate in Q&As on the subject thanks to Google video and YouTube. In these talks, he describes the exact feeling I had after watching An Inconvenient Truth. I don’t pretend to know everything there is to know about the climate or how the Earth will behave over the next century. However, neither should Al Gore or the alarmists who support his view. The fact is that there are still a lot of problems with the science behind these predictions. As I mentioned, I don’t think any sensible person denies the planet is warming. The climate changes and always will. The question at hand is how much it is changing. Crichton believes the change will be less than a degree over the next century. Gore places the increase at several degrees, which would lead to dramatic changes on the planet.

One of Crichton’s biggest selling points for me is his assertion that we cannot be so naïve as to believe that by changing one factor—in this case CO2 output—we will fix or slow down something as complex as the Earth’s climate. Crichton outlines this in a very clever way by comparing it to park rangers at Yellow Stone who believed that by eliminating one cause they would only have one effect on the environment. But as Crichton explains, the planet is not quite so simple and the rangers’ results had many unforeseen impacts. The same should be said for global warming. While global warming is certainly impacted by CO2 production, we still aren’t sure how cutting down one factor will impact the large scale of climate.

But above all, Crichton’s best point is one which perhaps only a science fiction writer could provide: One hundred years ago, he explains, there were few cars on the road and no planes in the sky. Today, there are 10,000 planes in the sky at any given point and more cars on the road than we can handle. So why do so many believe that one hundred years from now there will still be the same kinds of cars and the same kinds of planes in the air? As the character Ian Malcolm so astutely stated in Crichton’s novel Jurassic Park:

“[T]he history of evolution is that life escapes all barriers. Life breaks free. Life expands to new territories. Painfully, perhaps even dangerously. But life finds a way.”

Humans are much the same. As we moved from burning wood and coal (most CO2 output) to burning gas and oil (less CO2 output), we’ll again move to using sources like hydrogen and electrical vehicles or perhaps some other energy source. Nuclear power is certainly a technology we have today and should be taken advantage of—the unfounded fears of nuclear disaster are largely spurious and based on misconception. But that’s another diatribe at another time. In short, people will find a way because we have to. Human curiosity is the trait that drove our ancestors out of the Stone Age and led them to push ahead over competing species. As much as technology and information has changed our lives, the thing which makes us so unique on this planet has not changed. I believe Crichton accurately compares those who believe their actions will be the result of the end of the earth as we know it as no different than those who believe the literal word of Revelations. And all these doom and gloom predictions being touted as science need more careful evaluation and more honest review.

One hopes the tide will begin to shift and reason will return to the mainstream. In the end, I don’t fault Al Gore for his film or for the change in energy use he wants to usher in—certainly we should move away from burning fossil fuels—but the question becomes at what cost? Crichton’s concern and mine are the same. We should not be ready to throw billions of dollars into a theory that may very well turn out to be wrong and ought to focus on more immediate concerns like disease research and alleviating poverty. The alarmists insist we must act now in order to thwart disaster (Crichton aptly compares them to religious zealots), but unless there’s some real science behind these predictions, we can’t say with any surefootedness what will happen in ten years let alone fifty or one hundred. I won’t say that I’ll never be proven wrong on this point and I realize I am going against the majority opinion, but if we focus too heavily on the what-ifs we might be neglecting many important issues that we know exist.

It’s about an hour long, but I recommend it as a good primer on his position. Crichton was also interviewed on Charlie Rose last year where he defended his views. And he was part of a debate between global warming alarmists and anti-alarmists. In a surprising result, a majority of the audience watching the debate (46% to 42%) ended up agreeing with Crichton’s side.