thelongnews.com

I have been reading some about the outcomes of the Copenhagen session on climate change.  Most of the commentators suggest that not much happened and expressed their disappointment that no significant agreement was reached. What’s the long view?  In this case, I think a huge amount was vested in the hope that a single big meeting, with representatives of dozens of countries with varying views, would miraculously solve a problem that is complex, controversial, and expensive to solve.

The truth is, many meetings and individual actions will have to take place before major change comes about to prevent global warming.  For one, Americans are going to have to have to start trusting scientists.  As one writer recently put it on this topic, are you going trust scientists or are your going to trust Glenn Beck?  Somehow, some people believe that scientific facts are malleable to belief; that if we wanted to believe that gravity doesn’t always work or smoking doesn’t cause cancer or that people can levitate if they really put their minds to it, then that is OK.  In this case, though the scientific consensus shows clear evidence of long term changes in the weather and in our ecosystem, too many people believe we should decide for ourselves if this is true or not, and that our opinion matters.

In  this case, in the long run Nature will decide, and there won’t be a poll to see what we think.

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