Wednesday, April 11, 2007

Global Warming Dissent

There is no compelling evidence that the warming trend we've seen will amount to anything close to catastrophe. What most commentators—and many scientists—seem to miss is that the only thing we can say with certainly about climate is that it changes. The earth is always warming or cooling by as much as a few tenths of a degree a year; periods of constant average temperatures are rare. Looking back on the earth's climate history, it's apparent that there's no such thing as an optimal temperature—a climate at which everything is just right. The current alarm rests on the false assumption not only that we live in a perfect world, temperaturewise, but also that our warming forecasts for the year 2040 are somehow more reliable than the weatherman's forecast for next week.

Richard S. Lindzen is the Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Meteorology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Read the rest of his article here.

2 comments:

Eclecticity said...

Great quote! D.

Anonymous said...

Nor is there any compelling evidence that addressing the issue will result in economic catastrophe. In fact, Politcal Calculations has calculated that spending as little as $10B a year on offsets would comply with Kyoto.