How Not to Debate Nuclear Energy and Climate Change

Climate Change, Anthropocene, & Associated Issues

Date posted: 12/21/15

Michael Specter, of the New Yorker, opines that it has been just a week since negotiators from a 196 nations agreed, for the first time, on the need to cut the greenhouse-gas emissions on Earth. The accord is a couple of decades late, and its terms are far too weak. Nonetheless, the agreement is an enormous achievement, and it has been responsible for a rare, and well-earned, moment of optimism among climate-change activists. Finally, they can focus more seriously on finding the best approaches to reducing carbon emissions and then implementing them. What better time, then, to describe as climate deniers some of the people who have done the most to push humanity to save itself and the planet? I am not referring to the many insipid comments made by the people who are seeking the Republican Presidential nomination, although they are indeed stunning. (A tweet from the Donald ... The concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive.) At least he did not blame it on Syrian refugees ... yet. Any number of people have attacked the truth from the political right. But this week, Naomi Oreskes, a professor of the history of science at Harvard University, took a different approach... in an article published on Wednesday in the Guardian, she said that four climate scientists ... she did not name them, but linked to a piece by James Hansen, the former NASA chief scientist, Kerry Emanuel, a professor of meteorology at M.I.T., Tom Wigley, perhaps the most distinguished climate scientist in Australia, and Ken Caldeira, of the Carnegie Institution, who contributed to the team from the International Panel on Climate Change, which won the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize .. had adopted a new form of denialism. It was an interesting choice. There is perhaps nobody who has done more to alert the world to the dangers of climate change than Hansen or Caldeira. But ...read on ....