The Climate Debate Revised

It seems to me that the popular press misrepresents the true nature of the global warming debate. Judging from the New York Times, for example, or Fox News, one would think the global warming debate debate concerned disagreements over the actual existence of climate change. The Bush administration argued for years that the science of climate prediction was too uncertain to warrant any mitigating action. Environmentalists protested that a scientific consensus existed on global warming, pointing to numerous IPCC reports. These are the two sides of global warming which I was familiar with - does global warming exist, or does it not - this was how the debate was framed.

But in my opinion, this is not where the true debate on global warming lies. We can be reasonably sure that the earth is warming - although we have very little idea how much. (The IPCC has released a number of scenarios, ranging from 1C to 5.8C, but they have not released any data indicating which of these vastly different numbers might be the most likely). Therefore, climate change is occurring and will impact our world in a number of ways, including increased sea levels, increased storm intensity, and the northern migration of certain species. I believe that overall, the damaging impacts of climate change will probably outweigh the beneficial ones. This seems likely because it has been estimated that developing countries, due to geography and a lack of capital, may suffer the brunt of climate impacts. However, the real debate is this,

1) Will the impacts of climate change be severe enough to warrant taking severe precautionary measures to stop the emission of CO2? And will the bad effects of those precautionary effects outweigh the benefits of mitigating global warming?

2) How feasible is it to halt carbon emissions in time to mitigate climate change?

3) Is it monetarily more efficient to spend money preventing global warming or on the technological development which may protect us from the effects of climate change? In other words, what portion of money should go towards mitigation, and what portion to adaptation?

There is a lot of interesting material on this, real climate debate. For example, the Wall Street Journal has published some articles which deal with these issues. If you are interested, try checking out the following editorial from the Wall Street Journal.

"Climate of Opinion" Pay attention to the reference to the hockey stick debate.

http://www.opinionjournal.com/editorial/feature.html?id=110009625

On another note, I highly recommend trying out the blog "Real Climate" which is located at www.realclimate.org