Global warming: why you should not worry

if one asks about is the temperature increasing or decreasing it's always doing one or the other I have no concern about that by asking people to worry about whether it's going up or down you're immediately establishing dishonesty the earth is always changing climate change is nothing you have to prove it always is happening it always has happened so to make that into something alarming seems to me a little bit weird sea-level is a hard thing to measure actually at any given place traditionally sea-level was measured by what are called tide gauges the stick in the water basically and two things change what a tide gauge shows the land moving up and down and the sea moving up and down most places it's the land that is the biggest effect so you don't have a good measure of sea-level rise on the other hand for the last 30 years or so we've had satellite measurements that are actually measuring sea level it's very hard to relate these two measurements to each other they were measuring different things the general feeling is there is no evidence that it's different now than it has been for the last few thousand years it's been slowly rising ever since the initial rapid rise after the deglaciation 12,000 years ago the claim that we've suddenly seen a big change in that given we've changed the instrumentation and given the error bars cover the difference is not entirely fair and to suggest that what's been going on for thousands of years is something we should suddenly be alarmed at also it doesn't seem reasonable when you hear a ban ki-moon saying life as we know it will cease if we don't do something what is he referring to I don't know I mean man is adaptable people retired to the Sunbelt not to the Northwest Territory of Canada although catastrophe certainly occur they have many causes of which global warming is one of the least there are so many interesting questions in climate we still do not have a complete handle on why we had ice ages now you know if you want to be concerned you want a disaster having two miles of ice on your head is problematic and the earthís happens it's very much a matter of the unchallengeable assertion all religions have dogmas dogmas are not proven statements they're assertions that cannot be challenged it doesn't mean they're false I mean I'm not even suggesting that I'm simply suggesting that it's a bad idea to have anything that can't be challenged and and the trouble is all of us scientists are government employees even if we're working for private universities all research is supported by the government so as such we're very sensitive to what politicians say and believe that's a shortcoming you have to figure out how to fund science in a way that there are no incentives to artificially promoting things you know when you hear for instance a scientist saying the science is settled you know the person is stepped out of the science so you know I think that registers with ordinary people and whenever you see someone say you know instead of answering arguments how could so many people agree if it were true that it should be a red flag my view is one is conflated the trivial which is that temperature is changing climate is changing man play some role there's not much disagreement with predictions of disaster that are not connected clearly to warming or to our activities or to anything else and leaving people with the thought that if the first part is true the second part must be true and it's certainly not the case and then to add insult to injury to propose policies that would have nothing to do with any of it but involve trillions of dollars and harm to many people is I think crossing the line

Channel: The Boston Globe

Views: 841,543

Keywords: boston, globe

Id: pwvVephTIHU

Length: 5min 19sec (319 seconds)

Published: Fri May 14 2010