Carbon Footprints

in the USA, Time is reporting on The Public’s Dangerous Misunderstanding of Climate Change.

In a paper that came out Oct. 23 in Science, John Sterman — a professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s (MIT) Sloan School of Management — wrote about asking 212 MIT grad students to give a rough idea how much governments need to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions to eventually stop the increase in the concentration of carbon in the atmosphere. These students had training in science, technology, mathematics and economics at one of the best schools in the world — they are probably a lot smarter than you or me. Yet 84% of Sterman’s subjects got his problem wrong, greatly underestimating the degree to which greenhouse gas emissions need to fall. When the MIT kids can’t figure out climate change, what are the odds that the broader public will?

This confusion is hardly surprising given the huge volume of mis-information, obfuscation and outright lies published in many erstwhile responsible newspapers every day. The “damn the planet” movement, comprising of a well funded army of climate change ’sceptics’, deniers and shills, many with respectable enough academic qualifications, has successfully painted global warming as nothing much to worry about. These people could not be more wrong, and deep down I am sure they know it. It’s just that their pay-cheques depend on their denial. The planet is warming, the sea levels are rising; glaciers are, for the most part, in serious retreat all over the world. Arctic ice has hardly been thinner in human history. We are ripping up some 3% of our tropical rainforests every year, with clearance rates approaching the size of Wales every week. Taking action now makes economic sense, it makes environmental sense. Delay costs lives. — DS

Technorati Tags: Climate Change, confusion, consequences, global warming, public

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 28th, 2008 at 6:30 AM and is filed under Climate Change. 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.