Monday, June 25, 2012

Garth Paltridge is an emeritus professor with the University of Tasmania, a visiting fellow at the Research School of Biology at the Australian National University and a fellow of the Australian Academy of Science. He writes in The Australian Financial Review about how climate change research has moved from a "research backwater" into a "public-good scientific cash cow".

"The broad theory of man-made global warming is acceptable in the purely qualitative sense. If humans continue to fill the atmosphere with carbon dioxide, there can be little doubt that the average temperature of the world will increase above what it would have been otherwise. The argument about the science is, and always has been, whether the increase would be big enough to be noticed among all the other natural variations of climate. The economic and social argument is whether the increase, even if it were noticeable, would change the overall welfare of mankind for the worse.

"Attempts to resolve the arguments are plagued with problems, a lot of which are inherently insoluble. There are many aspects of the behaviour of the natural climate system and of human society that are unpredictable in principle, let alone in practice. But perhaps the biggest of the underlying problems, and it is common to both arguments since it inevitably exists when there is large unpredictability and uncertainty, is the presence of strong forces encouraging public overstatement and a belief in worst-case scenarios."

Read the full article here and tell us what you think about the article by leaving a comment below...