Climate Truth Blog

On Sunday, August 26, 2007, Mr. Silas Lyons, editor of the Record Searchlight wrote an editorial entitled “Healthy dissent brings truth closer.” This is my response.

DC

Dear Mr. Lyons,

Thank you for your editorial this morning (http://redding.com/news/2007/aug/26/healthy-dissent-brings-truth-closer/). Ever since you took over for Kelly I was curious what your position on climate change would be. As you know the Record Searchlight’s previous position on this issue is far from Samuelson’s but it would appear from your piece that you are staking your claim in the middle.

The best refutation of Samuelson was written over a year ago and can be found at: http://www.ucsusa.org/global_warming/science/exxonmobil-smoke-mirrors-hot.html.

I too subscribe to Newsweek along with Time, Harper’s, Nation, The New Yorker, New York Review of Books and Mother Jones among others. But I don’t rely on these magazines as my primary source of climate science news. For that I subscribe to science journals and magazines. The very best science journals on the planet are Science and Nature. They are expensive but they are they most important publications I receive each week. Another one I subscribe to is Scientific American. And one I am just now subscribing to is New Scientist. I highly recommend all of these.

Samuelson like many other contrarians are consistent. No matter how unanimous the science, they stick to their skeptical stance. There are many others like him. Your paper publishes one of the worst. Thomas Sowell. You also give space to another denier, George Will. But there are others. John Stossel, Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Bill O’Reilly, Alexander Cockburn (Nation). What they all have in common is a tenacious, non-scientific approach to a purely scientific issue. In other words they decide the results before they do the experiment. They know the truth before they examine the evidence.

Scientists are differerent. Unlike journalists they have to prove their statements. They have to run their studies and publish their data and it is picked over by hundreds of other brilliant scientists who then do their own studies refuting or replicating the original study or adding to our knowledge in important ways. Between 1971 and 2005 there were exactly 17,561 studies on climate change. In 2005 alone there were 2000 studies. That is 5 or 6 a day.

You and I cannot discuss climate science meaningfully unless we reference these studies and their results. Fortunately the scientists summarize all this regularly for us. As you know the IPCC publishes their findings every few years. A couple thousand of the top scientists on the planet (including one from Chico State, Dr. Jeff Price) scrutinize this data and come to their unavoidable conclusions. The facts determine their conclusions instead of their conclusions determining their “facts.” And then government officials with political views take over and water it down a bit (China and Saudi Arabia especially) and then the IPCC releases their results.

This last release which prompted your paper to recognize the facts in February of this year stated once again with more conviction than ever that:

Climate Change is real. It is human caused. It is extremely serious. We must act. If we fail to do so, the consequences for humanity and life on the planet will be disastrous.

If you study the IPCC reports you know they give us best and worst case scenarios. What you may not know is that the National Academy of Sciences (originally formed by Abe Lincoln) released a report this year which said in effect we are on a trajectory which will exceed the worst case scenario (http://environment.independent.co.uk/climate_change/article2609305.ece and pnas.org/cgi/doi/10.1073/pnas.0700609104).

What we know is that for millions of years the “natural” level of CO2 in the atmosphere hovered between 440 and 660 billion tons. We are now at 880 billion tons and accelerating. It may already be too late (our activity may have already triggered us past a point of no return…we are forcing a dramatic transformation on the planet and it is laboring to respond but there is no doubt it is responding). Scientists tell us the very best scenario is that life as we know it can continue with 55 billion more tons (they are guessing of course…we have already created a “new planet” that never existed since human beings existed on Earth).

That gives us 10 years. In your most optimistic views do you believe we are going to give up our addiction to the internal combustion engine? Do you believe China will quit their production of coal plants? We both know that we are going to put that 55 billion tons up there and much much more.

Imagine that you were could go back in time and prevent little Tess from jumping up and grabbing that bar that ultimately ended her life (Tess Stevens was a 12 year old girl who died in an accident in a construction area near her home.) Of course you would do it. Tess is a metapor for humanity. She is poised. Some of us want to stop her but Samuelson and Sowell suggest we keep discussing it (”healthy dissent?”). As we talk she is flexing those calf muscles and beginning her leap. We cannot stop her now. It’s too late.

Your editorial is titled “Healthy dissent brings truth closer.” In the same way that an alcoholic argues with himself about whether he should continue drinking or not.

We are presently engaged in the most incredible gamble that humanity has ever faced. Imagine if there was a child who had a life-threatening illness. Imagine 98 of the top doctors in the world all agreed on the cause and treatment but 2 doctors disagreed. Would you say “the doctors can’t agree so we will just wait” or would you gamble on the 98%? The odds are pretty good that you would “win” if you went with the consensus view.

But Samuelson and Sowell and others would gamble on inaction. Meanwhile the child grows sicker by the day.

Everything we hold dear hangs in the balance. Everything. We are gambling all life on this planet on the possiblity that virtually every climate scientist and every climate science report might turn out to be wrong. And meanwhile we do nothing. Healthy dissent? I call it sheer madness. Blind suicidal, genocidal insanity.

The irony is that your “healthy dissent” virtually guarantees we will ignore the science and let blind guides lead us to the end of millions of years of evolution. This is beyond comprehension.

I feel such an incredible sense of futility. I have naively sent letters to Bruce (Bruce Ross is the editorial page editor of the Record Searchlight) on this topic but it is rather pointless. Silly even. The rantings of a fanatic or zealot. My only hope now is that we see what we have done in time to apologize to the Earth, to the Creator and creation and honor her. The very worst outcome would be to carry out this crime and never acknowledge it.

Thanks Silas. Blessings to you and your family.

Doug Craig