Is it time to just live with climate change?

FILED IN: The Biofiles

An article in this week’s Time magazine raises an interesting point about climate change. While there’s a growing consensus that global warming is real, the author writes, there’s also an emerging body of opinion that says it’s either too late to stop it or it’s not worth trying to stop. We’d be better off, these pundits say, investing in ways to make it easier to deal with the effects of climate change: build stronger dams, dikes and levees; do more to prevent the spread of diseases like malaria; provide more aid to help the poor live with increasingly hotter, or damper, or drier, or stormier conditions; etc. (source: Green Options)

From the article:
“Maybe it happened the day after Hurricane Katrina or the night Al Gore won an Oscar for An Inconvenient Truth, but the first phase of the global-warming debate has ended. Even Skeptic-in-Chief George W. Bush recently convened a global-warming summit, where Condoleezza Rice told foreign diplomats that “climate change is a real problem–and human beings are contributing to it.

But the climate wars are far from over, and there are still dissidents emerging to challenge the green mainstream. Unlike past skeptics, they accept the basics of global warming but question its severity and challenge the orthodox faith that Kyoto Protocol-style mandatory carbon cuts are the best way to save the planet. Call them the bad boys of environmentalism: gadflies like the Danish economist Bjorn Lomborg, who just came out with the book Cool It, and rebel greens like the political consultants Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger, who detail their apostasy in Break Through. While their solutions may be flawed, the questions these contrarians raise about climate change are central as we shift into the next and more difficult phase in the debate: what should be done about it.”

Continue reading the article

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