In response to this article about "what happened to global cooling"
I think one of important things to get out of this is just because theories on occasion change as we get new information doesn’t mean we should never pay attention to science. For example, just because it was a common practice to bleed patients for medical purposes and that turned out to be wrong, would that mean that we should never pay attention to any new medical advances? It’s only in the world of politics where it seems you can’t learn from your mistakes, admit you are wrong, and move on.
Now that being said, there are two others factors that are important, the level of certainty and the risk of being wrong. The evidence for global warming continues to mount, and thus we have achieved a high certainty level. Of course there is still the chance that we could be wrong, that’s why it matters what we are suggesting to do about it. However in this case even if we turned out to be wrong the actions we would be taking to fight global warming would still be beneficial on the whole. Stuff like clean air and water are beneficial whether global warming is correct or not. In addition because fossil fuels are not a renewable resource a sound energy policy for the future would naturally focus on the development of renewables because duh they are renewable.
Therefore what you have here is a win win situation if you do something about global warming. If the scientists are right and we take measures to prevent global warming we have saved many lives, as well as possibly trillions in lost GDP. Plus helped to clean up the environment and build a sustainable future. If by some slight change the scientists turn out to be wrong, oh well. We still end up with a sustainable energy policy and a cleaner environment.
In the end basically what we are doing is spending a small amount of money now to purchase insurance against the good change that the scientists are right and we are roasting the planet. With the added benefit of building a sustainable future for our country and our world. It seems hard to beat that deal
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