A brief comment on the state of climate science, worth watching
Thursday, December 3rd, 2009The video here is of John Holdren, science and technology advisor to U.S. President Barack Obama. He’s also director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. His message, summarized in the statement below as part of testimony yesterday to a Congressional committee, is both powerful and disturbing: “In my judgement, and that of the great majority of other scientists who have seriously studied this matter, the current state of knowledge about it, even though incomplete, as science always is, and even though controversial in some details, as science almost always is, is sufficient to make clear that failure to act promptly to reduce global emissions to the atmosphere of carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping substances is overwhelmingly likely to lead to changes in climate too extreme and too damaging to be adequately addressed by any adaptation measures that can be foreseen.” I urge you to watch the full video, which is about 6.5 minutes long.
UPDATE: If you watch the video, Holdren starts off by discussing the hacked e-mails from the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia. Like most credible climate authorities, he says the e-mails have been scrutinized and spun out of context and in no way show there’s any kind of conspiracy or exaggeration of global warming. Rather, they show a bunch of frustrated scientists under siege by the persistent pecking of climate skeptics. I want to add here links to a Nature magazine editorial and an article in The Economist, both of which come to similar conclusions. Sorry Rex. I’m not saying these scientists who wrote the e-mails weren’t careless… I’m just saying it doesn’t appear to go beyond that, at least from any fair reading of the messages.
Tyler Hamilton is editor-in-chief of Corporate Knights magazine and a business columnist for the Toronto Star, Canada's largest daily newspaper. In addition to this Clean Break blog, Tyler writes a weekly column of the same name that discusses trends, happenings and innovators in the clean technology and green energy market. This blog is a personal project started in April 2005. It is not an official blog of the newspaper.
