STRONG EVIDENCE ON CLIMATE CHANGE UNDERSCORES NEED FOR ACTIONS TO REDUCE EMISSIONS AND BEGIN ADAPTING TO IMPACTS
at 11:12 am on Tuesday, 25 May 2010
(News from the National Academies, May 19, 2010)
WASHINGTON — As part of its most comprehensive study of climate change to date, the National Research Council today issued three reports emphasizing why the U.S. should act now to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and develop a national strategy to adapt to the inevitable impacts of climate change. The reports by the Research Council, the operating arm of the National Academy of Sciences and National Academy of Engineering, are part of a congressionally requested suite of five studies known as America’s Climate Choices.
“These reports show that the state of climate change science is strong,” said Ralph J. Cicerone, president of the National Academy of Sciences. “But the nation also needs the scientific community to expand upon its understanding of why climate change is happening, and focus also on when and where the most severe impacts will occur and what we can do to respond.”
Read the rest of the entry here.
This is the most important entry I have posted in the 8 months, and I have been presenting the best survey of the literature on climate change that I can find.
The signatories of the three documents you can access from this document comprise the most authoritative group of organizations one can imagine for the subject of climate change: The National Academy of Sciences, The National Academy of Engineering, the Institute of Medicine, and The National Research Council.
Not only do these documents address the fact of climate change and the role of human activity in that change, these documents describe the urgency of the situation, and they make recommendations of things we need to do to try to slow the process down.
I think that all three of these documents are required reading for anyone interested in the so called “controversy” about climate change. Those of us who understand and are concerned about climate change will perhaps find some comfort in this affirmation of that understanding, and some support to use in discussions with deniers. These documents should also be required reading for any serious or intelligent person who still has some doubts about the reality and seriousness of human-caused climate change.
Any person who reads these documents and still claims to have doubts is either simply science-illiterate and incapable of understanding, or they are willfully denying climate change for religious or (more probably) some misguided political reason. The second reason, by this time, is inexcusable. The weight of the authority for these documents is overwhelming. As Bertrand Russell says about the use of authority on scientific matters:
The experts are agreed (approximately 97% according to a recent poll). No longer can “There is no consensus”, or “The science is not settled” be accepted as excuses for so-called climate-skepticism.
Amen to that–the science is settled.
However, I don’t see anyone among the vox populi getting it. Nor are the politicians getting it.
Obama doesn’t get it. The UK doesn’t get it. IN the EU only Germany seems to have started taking it seroisuly with their strong support for solar and other renewable energy technologies. China doesn’t get it nor does India. It’a biz as usual around the world. And now S.Korea might be trying to draw the US into another war when we cannot afford even the two we are already in.