You don't even have to look at the science to know.
(but if you want to, there are smart vs. not-so-smart ways to do so)
'I don't think the American public has gripped in its gut what could happen...We're looking at a scenario where there's no more agriculture in California. I don't actually see how they can keep their cities going.' ...up to 90% of the Sierra snow-pack could disappear...'
- U.S. Department of Energy Secretary Steven Chu (*)
(so
yes, it matters; see what two with a track record for prescience, climatologist
James Hansen (pdf) and
Nobel economist Paul Krugman, say about where we're headed if we continue to delay taking action. )
How can you, a nonscientist, get the best climate science understanding for the least effort? Here are a variety of smart approaches, from the speediest approach down to more time consuming ones.
* Quickest: See what reputable groups say. In short, there is a
scientific consensus - see this
huge list of reputable orgs, including - to my knowledge - all the major scientific societies who've weighed in.
(yes, it's fine to rely on this "consider the source" strategy; we do it all the time. Here's the credibility spectrum.)
(Q: but what about "oh, the scientists are all biased"? Answer: a critical look finds the evidence is against this claim.)* See the evidence: read
The Science of Global Warming - How do we know we're not wrong? (pdf).
(In short - multiple lines of evidence and theory all point the same way; and predictions have been borne out.)* Understand why there still seems to be controversy among the public:
- Cranking up the back-and-forth noise is an effective PR strategy to delay action on climate: when the noise hides the signal(i.e. the actual information on the threat), the public stays ill-informed and won't pressure for action.
(Climatologist Gavin Schmidt points this out.)- Watch
You CAN Argue with the Facts, exposing fossil fuel industry efforts to manipulate the public.
* Or, if you have time in spades, you can know thine planet's "enemy"
*, by checking out some claims from a contrarian climate blog. A smart strategy for doing this: wait about a day, then scan the headlines at my climate-related science blog aggregator
Warming 101 for a post debunking it
*; typically someone will have done so
*.
(I checked out the claims at a local contrarian blog for an entire month, in Sept 2007; it's not worth doing again. I'd started out assuming good faith misunderstandings, and got increasingly frustrated as my corrections had zero effect on the ensuing output of the blogger, a strong-willed local emeritus engineer; unfortunately the tone of my comments reflected this.)
(There's no shortage of contrarian websites you can try this calibration with. These sites commonly tout short-term variation as contraindicating longterm trends - they confuse weather(short term) with climate(long term), and they lump weathermen in with climate scientists. They'll also tout "lists of experts" rich in folks with no climate expertise; e.g. the anti-regulation group The Heartland Institute still lists biochemist/molecular biologist Bruce Ames among these "global warming experts", six months after Ames wrote them pointing out that he had never claimed to have any climate expertise.* Become an expert yourself; learn the physics of climate from U. Chicago climatologist Ray Pierrehumbert's "Climate from First Principles" (
read it now, or when it's published by Cambridge University Press.)
And please, talk, gently, about the threat posed by climate change, to your less-clued-in friends and neighbors; we're all in this together, we
should be on the same side. It matters; and you owe it to the young people you know.
(And if you still don't care, keep in mind that they will care, and they'll be choosing your nursing home.)
"If only it were true that all that was at stake was a debating society trophy." *
my great great grandchildren
ask me in dreams
what did you do while the planet was plundered?
what did you do when the earth was unraveling?
Surely you did something
when the seasons started failing?
... *
"My measure is to imagine how this will all read to youngsters in 50
and 100 years, if they look back to assess how well we did by them,
managing what would become their world." *
