Skeptical Science moving into solutions

Now me, my background is in physical science so I'd be happy to concentrate on that aspect of climate change ad infinitum. But I'm also conscious of the fact that climate change is not just a topic of academic interest. Human activity is having an impact on climate change and, somewhat poetically, climate change is having an impact on humanity. Until now, Skeptical Science has concentrated on matters of pure climate science. But now, we're going to start exploring the question of what we should do about it.

Currently, all the skeptic arguments are sorted taxanomically with three parent categories: "It's not happening", "It's not us" and "It's not bad". We'll begin this new "era" with Dana1981 shortly addressing a 4th parent argument, "It's too hard". I'm still keen to keep the rebuttals firmly based in peer-reviewed science wherever possible and this post is no exception. Then we'll dig into some of the sub-arguments such as "Mitigating CO2 will ruin the economy", "Better to adapt than mitigate" and the dreaded topic of geoengineering.

Policy is not my strong suit and I must confess, my views on various solution strategies are not as well formed as my views on the attribution of climate change. So I expect to learn a lot from these discussions and hopefully everyone else will too. The Comments Policy still applies, of course. But when we get into areas of policy, the line between science and politics will get a little blurred. Nevertheless, the goal will always be to foster constructive dialogue so inflammatory and off-topic comments will be moderated as before. So play nice.

Posted by John Cook on Monday, 8 November, 2010


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