OpenSpace4Life

One common accusation leveled against environmentalists is that we are too ready to believe the worst, and take bad news about Earth's climate and biosphere without question while denying that good news could be anything but conservative propaganda. Like most stereotypes, this one has a core of truth to it. For instance, consider your reaction to the following news items:

The much-discussed Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report does not corroborate the predictions of disaster made in Al Gore's Oscar-winning documentary, An Inconvenient Truth. I haven't read it myself, but I'm trusting John Tierney of the New York Times with the following details: "While Mr. Gore’s movie shows coastlines flooded by a 20-foot rise in sea level, the report’s projections for the rise this century range from 7 inches to 23 inches." Still enough to flood some low-lying coastal plains, yes, but it's safe to say that most major cities are built more than two feet above the high-tide line. And because Greenland is not melting as fast as we thought, the world's ocean currents are "'very unlikely' to undergo 'a large abrupt transition during the 21st century,' according to the new report." And even if they did, Dr. Richard Seager of Columbia University says it probably wouldn't matter much.

Meanwhile, the NY Times also recently picked up on a year-and-a-half-old claim by a prominent if atypical environmentalist, Stewart Brand. Brand has been proposing four "heresies" that he thinks will soon become the new accepted truths in the green movement. First, according to Brand, population growth figures are dropping everywhere, not just in industrialized nations; second, he believes that the cause is not a standard "demographic transition" out of poverty, but the much more widespread population shift into the cities. "In every single region in the world, including the U.S., small towns and rural areas are emptying out. The trees and wildlife are returning." By itself, this statement seems wildly improbable, since all those new city-dwellers still demand the same amount of farmland to feed them, even if fewer people are doing the farming. But Brand's answer to that is genetic engineering: "GM crops are more efficient, giving higher yield on less land with less use of pesticides and herbicides. That's why the Amish, the most technology-suspicious group in America (and the best farmers), have enthusiastically adopted GM crops."

Finally, two more notes on global warming. The first is Brand's fourth heresy: he says that nuclear power, a well-established technology for large-scale centralized electricity generation, stands a far better chance of becoming the near-term solution to CO₂ emissions than renewable energy does. Brand, who oddly enough hasn't heard the good news about the gulf stream shutdown hypothesis, is worried that we could take "Kyoto accords, radical conservation in energy transmission and use, wind energy, solar energy, passive solar, hydroelectric energy, biomass, the whole gamut. . . . add them all up and [find that] it's still only a fraction of enough." His opinion is that dealing with radioactive waste will be far easier than coping with severe climate change.

Now, if you're a typical environmental type, you probably thought: "Sure, the Greenland glaciers speeded up and then slowed down, but they could accelerate again at any time. This Richard Seager guy could be another of those industry-funded consensus-buckers who will make up anything. World population really isn't that predictable, and all those burgeoning megacities could collapse soon when their ecological footprints get too big. Genetic engineering is too dangerous--we'll be seeing some of the first truly disastrous effects any time now. Likewise, worries about nuclear waste may be easy to dismiss when it's still sitting next to the power plant under heavy guard, but what about all the things that could go wrong while you're trucking it across country to centralized storage locations? And on a more positive note, what about those charts where adding up several "wedges" worth of non-heretical solutions could actually be more than enough? (Although what is 'enough', exactly?)"

And some of those objections are probably valid, but consider this: in this era of massive and accelerating change, we can't really afford to quickly discount any new information that might alter our picture of the world.