Global Warming Skepticism… Still? Really?
Come on, Fox News. Really? Al Gore has Venus Envy? Really?
The question with global warming at this point is not, “is it happening?” It is happening. If you didn’t believe it was happening ten years ago, read the last ten years’ worth of research. The question is also not, “is Earth going to become Venus?” Earth is not going to become Venus. Al Gore did not say that Earth is going to become Venus. Al Gore also did not invent the internet. What Al Gore did point out was that the presence of CO2 in the atmosphere affects a planet’s temperature. Not controversial.
The real question that needs to be asked is what is the impact of the warming, and how quickly is it happening? That will guide the severity of our response, and there is legitimate dispute over that between legitimate scientists (no, globalwarming.org, brought to you by the Competitive Enterprise Institute doesn’t count). But for some reason there is still a large subset of the population that doesn’t want global warming to be true. Or doesn’t want us to recognize that it’s true. Given the risks involved, why would that be?
Change doesn’t look good when you’re on top. The United States has dominated the global economy for a while, so the idea of changing the fundamental nature of how we derive our energy is scary for entrenched corporate interests. That’s it. That’s all that’s going on. The problem is, other countries are spending this time innovating. And when we do pull our shit together, we’ll be behind.
When you got to the top because of innovation you have two ways of staying on top. Either continue to innovate, or choke off the ability of others to innovate. We’ve gone with the latter method for too long.
