Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
WhatwasIsupposedtomakeofallthis?ShouldIgobythemorepopularposition?Myscienceteachers
had taught me that this, historically, was a recipe for failure, and that we should believe things only if
someone can give compelling evidence for them.
But there was so much going on in discussions of global warming, I didn't know how to decide where
the evidence lay. I would hear different sides say different things about sea levels, polar bears, wildfires,
droughts, hurricanes, temperature increases, what was and wasn't caused by global warming, and on and
on.
With such a mess to work with, I—like most, I think—tended to side with the scientists or comment-
ators whose conclusions were more congenial to me. I will admit to reiterating the arguments of skeptics
of catastrophic global warming with the lack of rigor I think is extremely common among believers. But I
didn't do this for long. I acknowledged that I didn't really know what to think, and the idea that we might
be making the Earth fundamentally uninhabitable scared me.
CLIMATE CLARITY
My greatest moments of clarity came whenever I discovered an author or speaker who, instead of giving
his particular answer to the question of global warming, would
try to clarify the questions
. For example:
“What exactly does it mean to believe in 'global warming'?” Some warming or a lot? Little deal or big
deal? A little man-made or a lot man-made? Accelerating or decelerating?
Having a background in philosophy, I recognized that most discussion of global warming would not
stand up to fifteen seconds of scrutiny by Socrates, who alienated fellow Athenians by asking them to
define what they meant when they used terms vaguely. I think Socrates would have been all over anyone
who spoke vaguely of global warming or climate change without making clear which
version
of that the-
ory they meant: mild warming or catastrophic warming.
A huge source of confusion in our public discussion is the separation of people (including scientists)
into “climate change believers” and “climate change deniers”—the latter a not-so-subtle comparison to
Holocaust deniers. “Deniers” are ridiculed for denying the existence of the greenhouse effect, an effect
by which certain molecules, including CO
2
, take infrared light waves that the Earth reflects back toward
space and then reflect them back toward the Earth, creating a warming effect. But this is a straw man.
Every “climate change denier” I know of recognizes the existence of the greenhouse effect, and many if
not most think man has had some noticeable impact on climate. What they deny is that there is evidence
of a
catastrophic
impact from CO
2
's warming effect. That is, they are expressing a different opinion about
how fossil fuels affect climate—particularly about the nature and magnitude of their impact.
Once I was clear on how unclear the questions we were asking were, I could ask better questions and
get better answers. And once I got clearer on how to use experts as advisers, not authorities, and how to
always keep in mind the big picture, I had a much better chance of getting the right answers to the right
questions.
Here's how I put the right questions now, from a human standard of value.
The first is: How does fossil fuel use affect
climate livability
? When we burn fossil fuels, what are all
the climate-related risks
and all the benefits
that result?
