Grossly Embarrassing Lecture on Global Warming
A reader offers this lecture delivered at Hillsdale College as proof that there is no scientific consensus that climate change represents a real threat to humankind. It begins:
In a recent survey of Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development countries—i.e., all the rich countries in the world—about 60 percent of respondents said they believe that global warming will likely or very likely lead to the end of mankind.
I’d sure like to see the results of this “survey,” if it was taken at all. It purports that more than half of the people living in the developed world believe something that anyone, even the fiercest tree-hugger imaginable, couldn’t possibly accept, i.e., that global warming will probably put an end to humankind.
I’m not saying that the average German, Japanese, or American is completely up to date on climate science, but they’re not morons, either. Take the worst case scenarios, in which greenhouse gas emissions cause temperatures to rise by 5°C from pre-industrial levels, and the planet is ravaged by sea-level rise, storms, wildfires, etc. Is there any eventuality in which the human race is wiped out? Of course not. There will be huge losses in land mass, food and potable water. There will also be suffering at heretofore unseen levels.
If you want to be taken seriously by people who can actually think, why start your lecture by asserting something that couldn’t possibly be true?
What’s actually “funny” about this piece — is that even though the author / speaker used a huge amount of “debatable facts / debatable logic” / and a “whole lot of words” in reaching his conclussion: he did reach the proper and correct answer to the problem we face — the need for a source of “clean, low cost, available, low cost, electric power”.
But almost nobody seems to be interested in actually achieving that aim — even though “it”, i.e. clean, low cost, available, electric power — is being readied to be made available in the very near future.