Hot, Flat, and Crowded (II)

I dedicate this post to the climate-change deniers.

Climate-change deniers come in three basic varieties: those paid by fossil fuel companies to deny that global warming is a serious human-caused problem; those scientists, a small minority, who have looked at the data and concluded for different reasons that the rapid and extensive increase in greenhouse gas emissions since the Industrial Revolution is not a major threat to the planet’s livability; and, finally, those conservatives who simply refuse to accept the reality of climate change because they hate the solution – more government regulation and intervention.

That the climate is now changing in ways unusual against the backdrop of long-term natural variation is accepted by nearly everybody. There’s a very strong understanding among knowledgeable scientists that human activities are responsible for most of what’s unusual about the current pattern of climate changes. Yet many in the media have treated climate change as if every one of this points were still in doubt and the expert community was equally divided on them.

The current reality is that not only is the climate changing because of human activities, but there is also mounting evidence that it is changing considerably faster than even the most worried climatologists were predicting just three of four years ago, and may unfold in an even more unmanageable and disruptive manner than they expected.

"Hot, Flat, and Crowded" - Thomas L. Friedman, 2008