The Global Warming Debate is Broken


Indoor Thermometer at 400mm No Flash With OS
It's either warmer or not. Read the thermometer.

Because of the upcoming talks at Copenhagen, everyone’s been talking about global warming recently.  The news even featured  a member of a Commonwealth government claiming that global warming is not true.  In my own country, Republicans like to say that global warming isn’t true.  The opposition parties in both countries disagree.  Look, this debate is over the wrong question.  There can be no debate about whether global warming is happening.  It either is or it isn’t.  That’s not up for debate.  Are average temperatures higher year over year compared to the past?  Then we have global warming.  The globe is getting warmer.  End of debate.  If not, then we don’t have global warming.  What we really need is debate over whether it’s human caused, human exacerbated, or neither.  After all, the planet has been warmer and cooler than its current temperature.  So we need to figure out if what we’re doing is enough to make a difference.  If it is, we should probably knock it off so we don’t make things worse.  If it is solely our responsibilty, then we need to stop right away.  But if it’s going to get warmer no matter what and our activities only matter in the thousandths of a degree, then there’s no point in doing anything.  So this is where we need to be and this is what we need to figure out.  Stop arguing over whether the planet is getting warmer or not.  It’s like arguing if the sun came up today.

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3 responses to “The Global Warming Debate is Broken”

  1. Here’s the problem: Politics has interfered with the actual science for so long that the waters have been muddied. If you want proof of that, just look at the leaked CRU e-mails. The Green movement is one fake as far as I’m concerned, and they will remain as such until they kick out the likes of Al Gore and others.

    • I’ll agree on the politics haven’t mucked everything up. Not sure if Gore has been actively malicious, but he certainly changes the way people approach the debate simply by his presence.

      I know this isn’t provable on the net, but your name (or at least the one you provided) sounded very familiar. So I thought for a bit and I’m wondering if you’re Thomas Holbrook of the Holbrook institute who’s always on Marketplace on NPR.