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Location: Buda, Texas, United States

Technologist, entrepreneur, writer, idealist, activist. A lot of things in our country and world are screwed up right now (government corruption is a prime example), and we can either just watch things get worse or tackle the problems head-on. We need to choose the latter path.

Sunday, August 03, 2008

Adding Rationality to the Climate Change Dialogue

There are two very thoughtful opinion pieces about climate change today in our nation's most prestigious newspapers, the Washington Post and the New York Times.

In the Post, reporter Joel Achenbach has a terrific think piece called:

Global Warming Did It! Well, Maybe Not.

Achenbach does a terrific job in making it clear that "climate" and "weather" are very different things, and that by linking almost any weather anomaly to climate change in the end only confuses the issue and gives ammunition to the global warming "deniers." I think that he makes an important point, even if -- as I believe is the case -- climate change is making our planet's weather increasingly erratic.

In the New York Times, acclaimed Op-Ed columnist and author Thomas L. Friedman (the author of the best-seller The World Is Flat) has an equally insightful piece in:

The Iceman Cometh

In it, Friedman recounts his recent visit with leading Danish scientists, who are studying ice samples that go back tens of thousands of years so as to better understand climate change patterns long ago. Of course, what they find could help us understand (and hopefully mitigate) our current climate challenges.

Friedman's conclusion, to me, is chilling:

In an article just published in the journal Science Express, Dahl-Jensen’s team wrote about how it had discovered from the ice cores that the atmospheric circulation in the Northern Hemisphere over Greenland “changed abruptly” just as the last ice age ended around 11,700 years ago.

It seems to have been driven by a sudden change in monsoons in the tropics. The change was so abrupt that it warmed the Northern Hemisphere over Greenland by 10 degrees Celsius in just 50 years — a dramatic increase.

“It shows that our climate system has the ability to make very abrupt changes all by itself,” said Dahl-Jensen.

Some climate-change deniers would say that this proves that mankind is not important in changing the climate. Climate change experts, like Dahl-Jensen, say it’s not so simple: The climate is always changing, sometimes very abruptly, so the last thing that mankind should be doing is adding its own forcing actions — like pumping unprecedented amounts of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. Because you never know — you never know — what will tip the balance and send us hurdling into another abrupt change ... and into another era.


Jerry

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