My latest DeSmogblog post is a rundown of my little debate with Michael Shermer about global warming, which can be heard at roughly minutes 5:30-13:00 on the latest podcast. I doubt I'll change Shermer's mind, but I really am not satisfied with his "wait and see" position on this issue. Here are some of the reasons I give at DeSmog:
First, the excess CO2 that we put in the atmosphere lasts there for centuries—so if the warming isn’t on the low end, we’re stuck with it. This suggests that waiting around could be a pretty bad idea. Is that a risk worth taking? Second, we know what the planet was like with vastly elevated levels of CO2 in the Earth’s past. Here’s the extreme, as described by Harvard’s Dan Schrag: “50 million years ago, we believe that carbon dioxide was between 4 and 10 times higher than present. At that ...
