The Climate Debate Is Settled…Except for the Part That Isn’t

The post The Climate Debate Is Settled…Except for the Part That Isn’t appeared first on WhoWhatWhy.

While man-made climate change is settled science, the full consequences are still unknown and will probably always remain so. But that is no argument for inaction. In fact, citing uncertainty as a reason for doing nothing is a recipe for global disaster.

So says former New York Times journalist and climate expert Andrew Revkin, who was quoted in Bret Stephens’ inaugural Times column on climate change and wrote his own oped in response to it.

Revkin tells WhoWhatWhy’s Jeff Schechtman that the debate should focus on how we as a society can make the world less vulnerable to more frequent droughts, fires and floods that are expected as the planet’s temperature rises.

He argues that the advocates of policies to address climate change should take care to emphasize the difference between the scientifically undisputed fact of global warming and the honest disagreements over the best ways to cope with its effects.

Revkin said both sides need to disarm from absolutism and accept an honest assessment of uncertainty and of the “known unknowns” in the area of policy. Clearly, what’s needed is more conversation. Perhaps this was behind the decision by the New York Times to hire Stephens.

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Full Text Transcript:

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Jeff Schechtman: Welcome to radio Who What Why. I’m Jeff Schechtman. Even in our siloed, hyper-polarized time, there are issues that are subject to and deserve honest debate: the direction of foreign policy and America’s place in the world; even healthcare is a legitimate subject with many points of view about how best to deliver it to the maximum number of people, at the best possible price.

People can disagree, as they can about taxes or education policy. But none of that seems to be so with respect to climate change. In an area where the science is clear, it should be a little like math. Generally there’s only one answer as to the fact that it is happening. The consequences of it, however, can still be subject to honest and open debate.

So why then, does the New York Times think it’s okay to have an op-ed columnist who appears in many respects to be a climate change denier, who is focused on the wrong issues about climate change. And why does he flaunt that in his very first column? To try and understand this and put this in context, I’m joined by a man who uniquely understands both journalism and climate science.

He’s Andrew Revkin. He’s a senior reporter for Climate for ProPublica. He formally wrote about these issues for the New York Times, and is in fact quoted twice, in New York Times’ op-ed columnist, Bret Stephens’ first column.

It is my pleasure to welcome Andrew Revkin to the program.

Andrew, thanks so much for joining us.

Andrew Revkin: I’m glad to be on, thanks.

Jeff Schechtman: Do you sense that there is something uniquely different in talking about the politics and the issues surrounding climate science and climate change, as opposed to some of the other issues we might be talking about and debating about in this day and age?

Andrew Revkin: Well, your intro was really good. The one thing that gets missed in the climate debate is that the facts include a lot of things we don’t know. In other words, it’s clearly established that greenhouse gases function, that more of them warm the world, and that they’re warming the world … There’s no other thing that explains warming since 1950, unless you include a dominant role for the build-up of greenhouse gases from people.

Those are basic things, the long-lived nature of CO2. You release, you burn a chunk of coal that’s been in the ground for tens of millions of years and that’s been out of circulation and you’re adding more CO2 to the air, the CO2 lasts centuries if not longer in circulation, and then that builds like unpaid credit card debt. Just stopping your spending doesn’t even necessarily reduce the amount of the air, just like it doesn’t take away your debt if you slow down your rate of spending.

So those are all facts. But then here the hard thing is that one of … And I’ve kind of said this a few times in pieces, there is 100% certainty that the most important aspects of the global warming problem are still durably unclear. And those are how warm is it going to get and that means from just some given build-up of CO2, you know there’s greenhouse gases like doubling the amount that was there for a very long time before the industrial revolution, doubling the concentration in the atmosphere. Literally, since 1979 there’s been more and more and more science and supercomputers and data thrown at this and we’ve had all those decades of accumulated climate patterns to look at. And the range of possibility is still basically from manageable to catastrophe, you know. From a couple of degrees to seven or more degrees centigrade.

That’s kind of, it’s the same. It’s been the same.   

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