Response to Climate Depot's Distortions
Reprinted from The Washington Post
By Andrew Freedman, F10
September 3, 2009
Dear Mr. Morano of Climate Depot,
Your lengthy response to my piece "Obama Needs to Give a Climate Speech - ASAP" contains numerous errors of fact and interpretation. I think you revealed your politically driven agenda quite nakedly when you assailed the United Nations for its role in climate and energy policy. The fact that you think the solutions to climate change will cost more than letting the climate system run amok, particularly in the developing world, does not stand up to close scrutiny in the academic literature.
I stand by what I wrote, especially the criticism of your venture as existing largely to create the impression of a crumbling scientific consensus on climate change, when in fact there is no such trend taking place in the scientific community.
Furthermore, your argument is breathtakingly heartless: You're actually pitching a do-nothing approach to climate change on the grounds that it would protect citizens of developing nations. If that is true, then why are leaders of developing countries, such as the African nations and small island states like Tuvalu and the Maldives, clamoring for the industrialized world to take action on climate change?
They rightly recognize the threat that it poses to their populations, through effects such as altered precipitation patterns, sea level rise, and the spread of tropical diseases, etc.
Study after study has shown that it is the world's most vulnerable who are going to suffer most from climate change, and yet you wish to focus on protecting them from the comparatively tiny risks of fighting the problem? What a remarkable argument. I can only imagine what the reaction to it might be in Dhaka, Bangladesh, where millions are at risk from sea level rise and increasingly intense tropical cyclones.
You make it hard to counter all your claims, yet easy to see through them, since you swiftly dismiss the Nobel Prize-winning U.N. IPCC as a "political" entity, rather than the scientific organization that it is. The U.N. sponsors it, but does not control its agenda. Scientists chart its course, not politicians. The IPCC follows one of the -- if not the most -- rigorous peer-review processes in all of modern science, and it has faced such criticisms before and consistently withstood them on the basis of the quality of its work. Only the Summary for Policymakers, which is a tiny fraction of the organization's report, must be approved line-by-line by political officials.
Your strategy is to dismiss the IPCC as political, and then swat away the joint statements of the world's major national academies of sciences and scientific organizations such as the American Geophysical Union etc., which then leaves you in the position of relying on the peer-reviewed academic literature, which you cherry pick to fit your preconceived political notion that is based on an antipathy to government.
Such reverse-engineered reasoning, in which you start at the desired political outcome and seek scientific evidence to support it, is nothing more than an anti-science and anti-science journalism agenda.
• Andrew Freedman is a Master's candidate at The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University.