The global warming “debate” is heating up once again…
In the last few months, the 2007 report by United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has come under attack. In a nutshell, the IPCC report found that global warming is real, caused by human greenhouse gas emissions, and will have disastrous effects around the world if nothing is done. “For the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report (AR4), 450 scientists from 130 countries served as Lead Authors. Another 800 served as contributing authors. More than 2500 experts provided over 90,000 review comments.”
Climate skeptics argue that because of a few mistakes, the findings of the IPCC are defective and should be thrown out. U.S. Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.) claimed that the IPPC’s mistakes mean that, “there’s no objective basis” for the finding that humans are causing global warming.
To be clear, there are mistakes in the IPCC’s report. The IPCC does not conduct their own scientific studies but relies on the body of scientific knowledge available. Out of the thousands of articles and studies they relied on, a handful have been found to have scientific flaws. I imagine the smoking lobby pointing at a handful of university studies with flaws and claiming, “You see? We don’t know that smoking causes cancer. The flaws in these studies invalidate all the findings of the Surgeon General. In the interest of ’sound science,’ we should start the scientific process over from scratch. It should only take another couple decades of study.”
When is it time to move from demands of proof to faith in what we know? The time is now.
As reported by in Yale Environment 360: “UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon and Lisa P. Jackson, head of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, have reasserted that the science behind global warming is incontrovertible and that government officials should reject attempts to derail climate change initiatives because of errors in reports by the UN’s panel on global warming.” This is a good start. The science behind global warming is incontrovertible. It is time to move forward.
For committed climate skeptics, there will never be enough proof. The IPCC is working on another report to be published in 2013 or 2014. When it is released, the skeptics will claim it is rubbish based on junk science. The skeptics will point out the window and say, “It’s snowing. See? There is no global warming if it snows.” No amount of proof will be enough for people who have made up their minds to not believe. More to the point, no amount of proof will be enough for people who have a political and/or financial stake in the non-existence of global warming.
The parallels between atheists and Christians draw themselves. Christians have faith. Atheists demand proof. Christians can never provide enough proof for atheists to believe. All Christians can do is try to show them the light and hope they finlly see it…