Rural climate skeptics are costing us time and money. Do we keep indulging them?
In April, at a rally in Los Angeles, a self-described climate-change activist named Bill McKibben proclaimed that people who live in the “low-lying coastal flood zones” of southern California “sink from sea level rise and drought” and “will die.”
McKibben made this statement as part of a series of “climate talk” in which speakers made more than one argument. Many of his claims were disputed. When he first made the statement, the media picked it up and ran stories with headlines like, “Bill McKibben Blasts Coastal Foes as ‘Humanity Kills for the Third Time.’”
McKibben was wrong in part. As it turns out, much more coastal land in California has already been damaged by coastal floods than was destroyed by Hurricane Katrina. (The government has already spent more than $2.9 billion to fix our coast.) But coastal floods are just one of many sources of uncertainty in climate science, and McKibben was not alone.
The most common myth of climate scientists is that the earth is warming. This is just plain wrong. The earth is warming, not cooling—the average temperature of the earth is increasing by about 1°C, with every 20 years of warming about 1°C. The earth’s surface was cooler 40,000 years ago.
The earth cannot naturally warm by itself. Global warming caused by greenhouse gases cannot do this, which is why scientists have to do the climate research for their careers, much of which does not get into the public eye.
Scientists who are climate skeptics and skeptics’ allies alike are largely wrong when they say that global warming is an unmitigated disaster. Rather than an unmitigated disaster, climate change is something bad that we must learn to manage on our own.
The scientific community is not united in its judgment. A team of scientists, including the chief author of the recent IPCC report (see “Climate Change: The IPCC Report”) concludes that climate sensitivity to greenhouse gases is likely low. (See “Climate Sensitivity,”.)
This is consistent with what we know about the effects of natural climate variability.