Letters to the Editor
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Falsifiable claims
Wjamesau asked earlier whether climate change theories are falsifiable. The answer is yes. All we have to do is wait another 20 or 50 years, depending on which model you're looking at.
Climate change predicts certain events and effects. You've heard about them. Retreating glaciers, migrating species, melting permafrost, blah blah blah. All these things are happening, and lend support to climate change theory. But we're not going to know FOR SURE until a few decades down the road, when a.) everything is fine, or b.) New York is underwater and the entire southwest looks like the Sahara. Or whatever the final effect turns out to be.
We won't know for sure until then.
The problem is: if climate change theory turns out to be accurate, and we do nothing, the costs to human society are astronomical. This is why I brought up the precautionary principle before.
Suppose we decide to do something about climate change, and we're wrong, and we spend all this money retrofitting our economies for nothing. What's the worst-case scenario? Global economic depression, perhaps, that makes that of the 1930's look like a Sunday evening barbecue.
Suppose we decide to do nothing about climate change, assuming that it doesn't exist, and we turn out to be wrong. What's the worst-case scenario? Well, global economic depression--AND, on top of that, massive dislocation of coastal populations, plummeting agricultural outputs, civil wars, famines, disease, massive species die-offs.
In my mind, climate change is just a symptom of the untenability of our current system. Other symptoms include the carcinogenic air pollution affecting millions of people in cities worldwide, fishery depletion, soil degradation, deforestation, rising rates of species extinction, etc., etc., etc.
It is outrageous to me that we seem (thus far) unwilling to consider how profoundly immoral it is that we are grabbing up the natural resources, and trashing our ecosystem, without the slightest thought for how this will affect future generations. The warning has been raised. We have no excuse now: we must grapple with this issue. How will our children and grandchildren look at us if they're condemned to life in an ecological monoculture, where corn is the only plant, and cattle the only animal? It's an exaggeration, to be sure, but not a wild one. We're on the way there already. As I mentioned before, humans already monopolize about a third of the total ecological output of the world's ecosystems. Our children will probably survive, but at what cost? In what kind of world?
Click on my signature for a video that details the same argument I made above. Thanks to whoever posted the video earlier, it's an excellent contribution to the discussion.