Why does everyone who favors doing even very moderate things about climate change, such as the reasonable sounding Gregg Easterbrook, feel compelled to start off by making the case that the observed and predicted warming of the earth is caused by human activity? Suppose the earth were going to get 5 degrees hotter over the next century due to natural causes. It will still be just as bad, no? And won't it mean that we will have to change our lives even more drastically if we have to offset Mother Nature's extended hot flash than we would if we merely had to stop pressing the microwave button ourselves?
Maybe the answer is that the predictions of warming assume human causes: warming will accelerate because our economic activity will as the population increases, undergoes industrialization, and so on. But then it's a leeetle bit misleading to address these issues as if they had two components: the fact of warming and the question of whether it is due to human or natural causes. And, anyway, I don't really believe that the two are so easily collapsed. As Easterbrook points out, the oceans are warming and that will cause additional warming/failure of cooling all by itself.
Still light-headed with the smell of shampoo, and not at all impressed with the number of white spots still on my brown carpet (though they did manage to suck up all of the chad from my absentee ballot last fall -- the Republicans were right in at least this: chads are very tiny, capricious little beasts that are virtually impossible to deal with), I remain yours,
Posted by Mike Green at July 13, 2001 02:17 PM