Wall Street Journal editorial questions the need to worry about climate change

The Wall Street Journal “No Need to Panic About Global Warming”

This op-ed is interesting to me politically but not all that interesting scientifically. You can see where these scientists are going with this in the second paragraph, where they correctly suggest that it is weird for a scientific organization to say that any evidence is incontrovertible. This is the whole dodgy issue faced by professional scientific societies: how to be socially responsible by letting the public know that global warming is a probable threat without falling into the kind of false certainties the public and politicians seem to need to hear in order to become sufficiently motivated to take action. Scientists look pretty foolish when they compromise their scientific values (such as honoring uncertainty and figuring out how to live with it) for social values (like preventing probable collapse of civilization). Maybe the public just has to become better schooled in uncertainty, so that the scientists can do well at what they most of the time get right: making reasonably certain estimates of how natural systems have functioned, are functioning, and will function.

The “scientific content” of this editorial is kind of shocking. Discussing a decade in a process that will take centuries to unfold is disingenuous. And notice how there are no evolutionary biologists on the list of signatories? Well, that’s because any evolutionary biologist worth her basic knowledge would laugh at the “plants and animals evolved when CO2 concentrations were about 10 times larger than they are today” comment. Over how many millions of years did this evolution occur? And when CO2 levels shot up rapidly over thousands or millions of years, how many species went extinct? Bringing in Lysenko after this total misrepresentation of how evolution works just pours salt in the wound. This is classic fact distortion, and not worthy of the title “science” no matter who signs the bottom of the op-ed.