Planetary Ruin

The global warming controversy is an ongoing dispute about the effects of humans on global climate and about what policies should be implemented to avoid possible undesirable effects of climate change.

The current scientific consensus on climate change is that recent warming indicates a fairly stable long-term trend, that the trend is largely human-caused, and that serious damage may result at some future date if steps are not taken to halt the trend. Mainstream scientific organizations worldwide (American Geophysical Union, Joint Science Academies, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, American Meteorological Society, and American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS)) concur with the assessment that “most of the observed warming over the last 50 years is likely to have been due to the [human caused] increase in greenhouse gas concentrations”[1]. However, there is also a small but vocal number of scientists in climate and climate-related fields that disagree with the consensus view.

There is considerable opposition from parts of the political and business communities both to the conclusion that humans are causing climate change, and to the need to take action to reduce human effects on climate. Chiefly, opposition arises because of claims that these actions would cause enormous expense and disruption to the current geopolitical and economic situation, with no obvious recognizable short-term benefits.

This is a public and political debate. While the climate projections involved in the discussion are constrained by basic physical principles (though they depend on assumptions about emissions), political and economic effects of both global warming and mitigation are more difficult to quantify. As an example, in asking whether the costs of reducing fossil fuel dependency compare with the costs of not taking action, one is confronted by the fact that it is difficult to anticipate social or technological changes that affect such costs.

This article is about that controversy. The description and scientific explanation of global warming is spread over several other articles:

This entry was posted on Friday, November 17th, 2006 at 10:39 am and is filed under Global Warming. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.