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Oh, here we go with this again. Is there climate change? Is it statistically real, what about the polar bears? I came into work this morning to find a 1999 BBC article written by Dr. Philip Stott tacked to my cube wall. His position, in brief, is that the media goes mad over hyping these types of stories, and that there are many factors involved in climate change.

His article has a fatalistic position, in that he cites billions of factors which may affect climate change, but that since human activity is responsible for only some factors, why bother? He states many factors affect climate change, including “the flip of a butterfly’s wing, and volcanic eruptions.” Yes, that’s right. That’s all I saw in rush hour this morning. Butterflies inside of metal boxes, powered by miniature volcanic eruptions. This must be science!

He points back to 150 years’ data showing that the climate didn’t change that much (.3 to .6 degrees centigrade), so there must not be a problem with human activity. Stott’s position is that “climate change” is a strawman humands are unable to fight. He conflates the impact of our technological creations on the climate with natural processes, and then informs us that “playing God with one or two politically selected factors” won’t help us. Adaptation will help us, since that is what we’ve done as a species. He closes by telling us that warmer weather will be great.

Stott’s position seems indefensible to me. Because the system is large, our impact is small? And there is no trend that our impact is growing greater? No generally agreed upon idea that this is occurring? Hmm, Stott doesn’t make reference to any specific trends, studies or ideas. It’s much easier to attack a strawman than refute hard science.

Stott is a scientist, and knows an infinite amount more about the climate than me. Using that position as a bullypulpit to deny human impact on the environment is disingenuous at best.

As climate change is discussed more and more, the media will work to distort the issue to its most fantastic proportions. The problem doesn’t exist, it’s all hype—the problem does exist and it’s HUGE!

Here’s a few more British and Canadians takes on the subject. The interesting part about these articles is that they start off by denying climate change or decrying scientists as “alarmist,” cherry-pick a few datapoints describing why they feel a certain way, and then close by ignoring the evidence on the other side. Here’s one by Ruth Lea, director of the Centre for Policy Studies describing how the UN’s research is all hooey, and burning fossil fuels could actually cool the environment. See, when it’s us screwing the environment, that can’t happen. We just naturally make it better. a bank all about temperature changes that occurred without our polar bears are not dying

The bottom line is that climate change as a result of human activity is happening everyday, and we as individuals can do many things to lessen our impact. Let the media find commentators to distort the issue all they want, and people can cling to whichever data points they want. It reminds me of a lecture I attended in college by the late Stephen J. Gould, an eminent biologist. He lectured on scientific bias, and showed us slides of textbooks from the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Many of the arguments about the scientific basis for racism ran to physiological differences between members of different races, things like forehead slope, for example. Gould showed how in the textbook example pictures the publishers used slight visual tricks to underscore the point. White skulls were shown level to an imaginary baseline, while black and Native American skulls were titled back a few degrees. In the same way, this argument is not about data, it’s about owning up to our responsibility as moral human beings.

What we know is that industrialization has led to a very different relationship between humanity and the rest of nature, and this relationship is destructive to us and to nature itself. We have 6 billion people now; in 50 years, 10 billion. Shouldn’t we invest some resources in figuring out how to lessen our impact on the environment?

In any event, here’s a link for you to help stop global warming today.