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Surrey Greens > Surrey Green Blog
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| Bloging to save our world |
3/30/2008
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Lorne Gunter's opinion piece "Little Ocean Tattletales Fail to Find Right Facts" (Vancouver Sun, Saturday, March 29, 2008) is full of enough logical and factual errors to render it ridiculous. However, I find it too frightening to be able to simply laugh it off. The doubt it and similar pieces raise in the public's mind about whether global warming is "true" or "real", as if it were a religious or philosophical matter, terrifies me.
In this piece, Mr. Gunter (a "senior columnist" with the Edmonton Journal, known, according to the Journal's website, for his "right of centre" views) displays a shocking ignorance about basic tenets of science, including how to understand and interpret data. For example, when Josh Willis, whom Gunter quotes, says that the slight drop in ocean temperatures recorded by NASA's buoys is "not anything really significant", Willis is likely referring to statistical significance. Yet Mr. Gunter apparently does not understand this. The statistical concept of linear regression can explain how the oceans could be slightly cooler for a period of a few years, yet warming overall. If Mr. Gunter is going to continue to write columns that challenge the highly-cautious findings and recommendations of the 2500+ scientists of the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), it behoves him to gain at least a basic understanding of these things, or risk looking like an idiot.
But what puzzles me most is this. What do climate-change deniers like Mr. Gunter think would motivate thousands of IPCC scientists to publish false reports on climate change, creating spurious concerns about the future viability of our planet? Do Mr. Gunter and others believe that these scientists secretly relish the role of doomsday prophets for the power and fame it brings them? Do deniers think that perhaps the scientists own shares in green energy companies and hope to become rich as a result of the frenzy of social change their reports will bring on? I would very much like Mr. Gunter to explain this, and further, to account for his sneering tone towards the IPCC scientists.
I cannot claim that I understand completely the motives of climate-change deniers like Mr. Gunter, but I do have a hunch as to one aspect. Climate change is the most serious threat humanity has ever faced, and is self-created. Virtually every citizen of industrialized countries (myself included) would love to reassure ourselves that the IPCC's reports are simply fear-mongering, that we are therefore free to continue our current lifestyles with impunity, and that our children and grandchildren - and generations beyond - can continue to live the "good life". To truly face the findings and recommendations presented by the IPCC - that we are on the precipice of disaster, that WE are creating the destruction our descendents will have to live with (if they survive) and that we must drastically change our ways - triggers such overwhelming shame and hopelessness in us that many of us cope by turning away from the facts and falling into denial.
So far, I have heaped coals of fire on Mr. Gunter's head. But, by running opinion pieces such as this one uncontested in the Vancouver Sun, Canwest must bear even more responsibility for extending this faux-debate, which feeds into the public's denial of, and apathy towards, global warming. Our children's and grandchildren's futures hang in the balance, and every year that we spend arguing about global warming and delaying taking real action brings us closer to the point of no return.
Wendy Belter
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