Whom do you believe about climate change?

Paul Craig Roberts, who was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury during the Reagan administration, has this to say about climate change.

Climate change is a controversy.  What appear to be independent scientists say that the climate is warming due to greenhouse gases produced by human activity. This warming, apparently measurable, has many impacts on sea levels, and on plant, animal, sea, and bird life, as well as food supply for a heavily populated earth.  [snip]

As far as I can tell the polluting corporations have sufficient think tanks and research institutes to neutralize the independent scientists.  If one is not a climate expert, which I am not, one doesn’t really know.  However, I have learned in my many years that an independent voice is far more reliable than a paid voice. 

Possibly climate change is occurring because of solar activity or because of activity inside the earth itself.  The attention should not be on the cause but on the fact.  First establish the fact, then look for the cause.

My view of this is that life depends on climate, and it doesn’t take a lot of change in one direction or the other to create problems for life.  This fact makes climate change an important issue, and corporations should stop paying people to lie about it.  [snip]

Climate change, if real, is clearly a much greater threat than Muslim terrorists or alleged Chinese and Russian hegemonic aspirations.  Therefore, Washington should spend some of the one trillion dollars Washington blows on the military/security complex on arriving at the best conclusion about climate change and its remedies, if any.

The United States is a strange country.  The population accepts the destruction of privacy and civil liberty out of fear of essentially non-existent terrorists created by propaganda, but ignores the threat of climate change presented by independent scientists, a threat amplified by the ongoing multi-year drought in California and the western US.

via Climate Change – The Unz Review.

Those who accept the reality of human-caused climate change are the U.S. Department of Defense, Pope Francis and Saudi Arabia’s oil minister, Ali al-Naimi, who has announced his country’s intention convert to solar energy for its needs by 2040-2050.

President Obama’s stance is hard to figure.  On the one hand, he says that it is important to limit global warming.  On the other, he promotes offshore and Arctic oil drilling, hydraulic fracturing for natural gas and agreements such as the Trans-Pacific Partnership and Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, which, based on what we now know, would create obstacles for governments that attempt to restrict greenhouse gas emissions.

I’m not a scientist, no more than Paul Craig Roberts is, but I think I know enough to have an intelligent opinion.

The greenhouse effect, in which gasses such as carbon dioxide and methane trap the reflected radiant heat of the sun, has been well-known for more than a century.

We know that human activity increases greenhouse gasses, we know that greenhouse gasses are increasing and we know that the predicted effect of this is taking place.

We know from studies of glacier ice cores and tree rings that global temperatures in the past have been correlated with concentrations of carbon dioxide, and we know that the concentration of greenhouse gasses is increasing faster now than in any previous era of which scientists have knowledge.

I trust that scientists who say this have a factual basis for their assertions because of the nature of science.  Any time scientists assert a finding, other scientists have an incentive to prove them wrong.  The conclusions about global warming have stood up very well over a long period of time.

LINKS

“Imminent” Collapse of the Antarctic Ice Shelf and a “New Era” in the Arctic by Dahr Jamail for Truthout.  More evidence of climate change.

Climate Change by Paul Craig Roberts for the Institute for Political Economy.

Tags: Paul Craig Roberts, President Obama