If we could overturn global warming … how exciting would that be?

What drives scientists? – Richard Alley’s Golden Nugget

h/t Variable Variability

4 thoughts on “If we could overturn global warming … how exciting would that be?

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  1. How exciting would it be? Enormously, I suppose, but it would be a brief celebration as we would quickly realize there were other existential threats potentially as challenging. Threats such as the freshwater crisis, our distended overpopulation and our massively excessive consumption of the Earth’s resources, both renewable and non-.

    I used to recite a lengthy list of these woes and troubles and invite readers to identify how they were linked, the common threads. It all comes back to the lifeboat scenario. We have to adopt equitable means and values without which humankind will not accept the measures needed to shrink our activities, our environmental and ecological footprint, safely within the Earth’s finite carrying capacity. We are currently consuming resources at 1.7 times our biosphere’s sustainable replenishment rates. We’re eating our seed corn. It worsens by the year and the signs are inescapable – rates of extinction, deforestation, desertification, algae blooms and oceanic dead zones, accumulating pollution. The lethal part is that we’re absolutely dependent on continuing to grow our excess consumption. Who would have dreamt of a global civilization organized on the model of Icarus?

    I met a fellow at a party on the weekend. He quickly got into the climate change as a hoax meme asserting he had genuine insights thanks to his degree in stats. I thought stats was a course, not a major, but perhaps I was wrong. This fellow proceeded to denounce the whole scientific method as flawed and based on faulty modeling. CO2? Nonsense, said he. Then, taking a barrister’s approach, I asked him, if his views were correct and demonstrable, would the fossil energy giants, who together have some $27-trillion in known reserves, not be using that as a club to beat the climate science types into submission? I suggested he take his insights to Exxon Mobil, Total, any of the giants, lay out his proof and collect their reward which I’m sure would run to several millions of dollars. With that he fell silent and the conversation blessedly ended.

    1. I think the exciting in Alley’s mind was that as a scientist you would be immortalized along the same lines as Newton and Einstein were to to demonstrate that Climate Change wasn’t happening.

      Not tha all our sustainability problems would be solved

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