I went for a few beers the other night with some buddies - we meet up regularly every month or two - and was quite taken aback (to put it mildly), when the topic of global warming and climate change came up, to realize that three out of the five of us were either in complete denial or at least strongly sceptical of global warming.
These are bright, well-educated, well-read people, and quite senior in their respective occupations - a film producer, an Internet marketer, a Canada Post manager and an electricity generation manager. We don't always agree on everything, of course, especially where politics is involved, although in general they are all thoughtful and concerned individuals.
For the record, the film producer and myself were the ones who were convinced that climate change was a major problem. I know there are grey areas, even areas where the statistics and the logic don't quite add up, but the balance of evidence seesm pretty clear to me.
The sceptic (although confusingly "sceptic" is now coming to mean denier...) was the Canada Post man, despite his generally left-of-centre, environmentally responsible views, and I normally have a lot of respect for his considered perspective. I may be doing him a disservice here, but his scepticism seems to be rooted almost exclusively in his reading of Michael Crichton's "State of Fear" which, however convincing and well-researched, is after all a fictional novel by a bright but non-specialized layman (and most certainly not a climatologist).
The two deniers were the computer man, (who remains very American in his outlook, despite living in Canada for so many years) and, interestingly, the guy who works for the Ontario electricity generation operator, who has obviously done a lot of work on the subject. Although his politics are usually well to the right of mine on most issues, this is not a party political issue. This is about facts and figures and their interpretation. And it is about ethics and doing the right thing. His interpretation is clearly different from mine (see a later blog for some of our detailed correspondence on the subject).
Not being climatologists (or even statisticians) ourselves, it seems to me that we have to put our faith in the scientists to a large extent. There will always be dissenting voices in the scientific community on almost any topic (hell, there are scientists out there who have managed to convince themselves that smoking is not bad for you), and that is as it should be. Scientific opinion, unlike mathematics, is based on peer reviews and consensus (Michael Crichton apparently argues that global warming theories have not been subjected to sufficient objective peer reviews - in fact, they have probably been peer reviewed to within an inch of their lives, possibly more so than any other current issue).
I for one am satisfied that the vast majority of scientific opinion is firmly in the camp that anthropogenic global warming (man-made climate changes) is real and increasing and that we are just arguing about the extent, and that, whatever that extent may be, we have to start doing something serious about it, and soon (like, yesterday). In my books, not to do so is immoral, and the time is long past for calling for more studies and more prevarication.
It was a good evening out, and we covered an awful lot more than global warming in our discussions, but I did fire off a few emails the next day, with links to the excellent "How to Talk to a Global Warming Sceptic", another layman's blog, but incredibly well-researched and with full links to source documentation.
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