In an August 2nd letter, Boris DeWiel suggested that perhaps society's concerns about human-caused climate change are simply a reflection of a human tendency to predict catastrophe, and that maybe we don't have anything to worry about. As he says, "maybe warmth will just turn out to be warmth," and who doesn't want to be warm?
Dr. DeWiel, who studies political philosophy, is proposing a hunch about human nature.
And, personally, I am not comfortable building our environmental policy on the foundation of a philosopher's hunch.
More importantly, Dr. DeWiel appears to be poorly informed about the state of the planet. The malign consequences of human activity are not awaiting us somewhere down the road: they are already here.
He says, "There will be real problems but we'll deal with those that turn out to be real." How about species extinction? According to Nature, one of the world's most prestigious science journals, 30% of amphibians, 21% of birds, and 25% of mammals are at risk of extinction.
Dr. Richard Muller, a MacArthur "genius" prize recipient and UC Berkeley physics professor, made waves in the denialist community a few years ago by publicly casting doubt on the reality of global warming. But then he did something about it.
Dr. Muller put together a crack team of physicists and statisticians to review all of the evidence on climate change, and just recently he wrote an open letter explaining his conversion from skeptic to climate change believer. The data are incontrovertible.
Dr. Muller reported that his group's analysis confirms a 3C temperature increase over the last 50 years, essentially all of which can be attributed to human-generated greenhouse gas emissions. Not only is the planet's temperature increasing, but the fraction of land that is desert has increased from 15% to 24% over the last 20 years.
It is not that there is nothing we can do to address these problems. The issue is that there is some urgency. The sooner we act, the easier it will be to avoid the problems in the first place.
Dr. DeWiel is a respected member of Prince George's community of scholars, but with that status comes a responsibility to be properly informed and to communicate to the public from a position of knowledge. We have plenty of people sending their uninformed opinions to the Citizen. Our professors should hold themselves to a higher standard.
Stephen Rader
Prince George
Editor's Note: Dr. Rader is an associate professor of chemistry at UNBC.
