The Ethics of Climate Change

This is my second post of the day, but I feel compelled to comment on an article on the above subject that appears in the June 08 edition of Scientific American. As I have said in earlier posts I am a regular reader of SciAm and generally find it a very informative and accurate source of current scientific findings and trends. On the issue of global warming, unfortunately, the editors have drunk the Al Gore Kool-Aid.

The subject article is a case in point. The fundamental flaw with the entire piece is that it is based on the a priori assumption that climate change or global warming is caused by human activity. Ergo humans have an ethical responsibility to do something about it.

The problem is of course that the presumption is most likely not true. In fact contrary to the often stated "fact" of a scientific consensus for anthropogenic global warming, in a recently released survey by the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine 31,072 scientists have signed a letter to the effect that there is no demonstrable linkage between man-made green house gases and global warming. Given that the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (or IPCC) report, which fuels the presumption that human activity is to blame, was prepared by about 600 scientists (who were not, by the way, unanimous in the conclusions of that report), the evidence would support the notion that if there is a consensus it is the opposite of what Al Gore and company would have us believe.

Further there is compelling data in published work by S. Fred Singer and Dennis T. Avery titled "Unstoppable Global Warming" demonstrating that historically global temperatures increase prior to increases in carbon dioxide in the earth's atmosphere. The clear conclusion is that global temperature increases are a cause for the buildup of CO2 not the other way around.

Rather than fret about the impact our lifestyle may have on the legacy we may leave our children, we should instead focus on an international effort to effectively deal with the consequences of inevitable climate change.