95 / Climate change will take care of itself - or will it?
In the paper (SMH) this weekend Professor Clive Hamilton's book 'Requiem for a Species' is introduced. The professor is none too subtle. According to him, the world is on a path to a very unpleasant future and it is too late to stop it. No maybes, no buts and very little optimism.
Apparently the book is a bit of a downer … as is the article. "Even the most optimistic assessment of the possibility of taking action on climate change is nowhere near adequate to the task of trying to protect the world from dangerous climate change. It's just too late now." Right, professor, tell us how it is.
Well, this is how it is: "It is now widely believed among scientists that the two-degree warming threshold could be crossed as early as 2040 without action." (That's a dire projection, because two degree warming will have devastating effects. Oceans will rise. Rivers will dry. Glaciers will melt. The elderly will die etc etc … my comments.)
What's really dire, though, is the fact that climate change deniers have a huge advantage, "because most people would prefer to believe them." He calls the rise of denialism, "a failure of the Enlightenment, of the notion that human beings can exercise their reason to assess the evidence and act in their own interest. For some people, it's easier to repudiate science and implicitly repudiate reason in order to maintain the fiction that everything will be all right."
Update, 20010.03.15
Today an article in the Herald cites a report by two scientific agencies - in a response to recent attacks on the science underpinning climate change - that Australia has warmed up significantly over the past 50 years.
In the article the former Australian of the Year and long-time climate campaigner Tim Flannery last month urged climate scientists to talk to the ''confused Australian public'' and answer their questions about the science. The director of the Bureau of Meteorology, Greg Ayres, told the Herald the purpose of the climate snapshot was to remind the public that the bureau had been collecting objective and observable climate information for a century. ''I would like to invite the Australian public to use … the information generated in the national interest to reach an opinion on climate change because it is objective information,'' Dr Ayers said. He said furthermore, "the trend in temperatures backs up the findings of the IPCC showing human processes, such as burning fossil fuels, was the primary cause of global warming."