A Pessimistic Take on Climate Change

Details

Author(s):
Publish Date:
June 22, 2013
Publication Title:
PrawfsBlog, June 22, 2013.
Format:
Blog Postings
Citation(s):
  • William Baude, A Pessimistic Take on Climate Change, PrawfsBlog, June 22, 2013.

Related Organization(s):

Abstract

This American Life is one of my favorite podcasts (besides the podcasted Supreme Court oral arguments, when the Court is in session).  But because of that, I wanted to take a moment to complain about a recent episode, about global warming. The show started with a vaguely promising premise:
The conversation about climate change is stuck. It's stuck. It's stuck in the same utterly tiresome place that it has been stuck for years. There are the people who believe that global warming is happening, and there are the people who don't believe that, going back and forth with the same retread arguments over and over. According to a recent Gallup poll, just over half the country thinks that climate change is real and is man-made– which, despite the crazy weather last year, is more or less exactly where it's been for most of the last decade, give or take a couple percentage points.
And today on our program, after a year that seemed like a dramatic preview of what climate scientists are predicting for all of our futures, we ask, why in the world is the conversation so stuck? That's going to be the first half of our show. And then in the second half of the show, we have found some places where it feels like battle lines are, in fact, shifting a little bit. We've found completely fascinating efforts by people who are consciously trying to lift us out of the mire and muck that we have been caught in, to end the standoff, to reinvent the exhausting, stupid climate change debate.
But the results were quite disappointing. All of their examples of people supposedly “reinventing” the climate change debate were people who were convinced that we needed to do something now to stop or reverse global warming, which is pretty much what that side of the debate has wanted all along.