Dirty Planet, Clean Hippie

So today hasn’t been the best Earth Day for me, because of various reasons related to the towing industry.  But also because a climate change denier decided to post on my site (under Al Gore Has a New Video, if you’d like to see it).  I’m going to let it stand because the truth is that there are people who deny climate change is happening, or deny that humans have had anything to do with it.  That’s fine.  At this point, the issue is almost like politics, religion, morality (not quite on that large of a personal scale, but similar nonetheless) or any of the big issues that you want to name.  This is because I could talk until my nose bleeds and they will keep their point of view.  By the same token, they could talk until their nose bleeds and I will keep my same point of view.

This particular denier points to “An Inconvenient Truth” as having graphics from the movie “The Day After Tomorrow” to prove the point.  I don’t know about that.  I do know that a lot of issues have come up with Al Gore’s slideshow.  Fine.  If you don’t want to believe Al Gore, that’s fine.  But I think before dismissing climate change altogether, you should take a look at the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

I was going to save this for another post, one that’s not so high and mighty (a la yesterday’s post), but I’ll go ahead and tell you about the IPCC.  It is composed of representatives from countries who are members of the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), and the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP), which are basically any members of the United Nations who wish to participate (130 out of the 193 countries today).  Its goal was to provide objective data regarding climate change to government policy makers.  Independent scientists evaluated any climate change information (peer reviewed) they could get their hands on.  Wikipedia tells me that in the past six years, 2500 scientists have contributed, with 800 contributing authors and 450 lead authors.  These people are from all over the world; there is no North American bias to this information, and the IPCC took pains to ensure that.  Further, the presence of government representatives in reviewing the reports - repeatedly - has ensured that no one agenda defines the outcome of the reports.

There have been some criticisms of the IPCC reports.  Some have claimed that scientists expect supporting data to be there for various hypotheses, and so they “make” it be there.  Others claim that the IPCC is too conservative, not placing enough emphasis on the dangers and the realities.

I don’t want everyone to get into a tizzy about this.  Honestly.  So what if the IPCC is seeing things that aren’t there? What if they are underplaying the dangers - warming, storms, extreme weather, etc? Then we play to the middle.  Does that hurt anybody?  If we reduce carbon, maybe people could breathe a little better in Los Angeles or Beijing? If we stop eating so much meat, maybe we wouldn’t have as many problems with heart disease (although to be fair, processed foods contribute to that)? And I realize that there are other, large, problems we need to solve (AIDS, poverty, war, other diseases, inequality of wealth distribution between the global “north” and “south,” and a lot of other things I can’t list here).  But climate change can also exacerbate these problems (poverty, health issues, famine, conflicts).

Obviously, I’ve already been converted.  You don’t have to listen to me. But before you throw away climate change because you don’t like Al Gore or you think people are wack-jobs, take a look at the IPCC’s Summary for Policy Makers.  It’s simplified and has a lot of graphs (which helped me out).  After that, if you think they were just trying to get a certain predetermined answer, that’s fine.  But if you come and talk to me about it, just know I probably won’t change my mind. Just like you probably won’t change yours.