Chuck Rice, a professor of agronomy at Kansas State University, will be one of two scientists who write a chapter on agriculture in a report by the United Nations Intergovermental Panel on Climate Change.
Prof. Rice was flattered. The appointment is “a tremendous honor and responsibility,” he said. And added that policymakers worldwide must be equipped with the best and latest scientific information as they respond to climate issues.
The UN report won’t be completed and released to the public until 2014.
Staggering news? Hardly. Heck, why spend four years of study to prepare a report on how climate change will affect world agriculture when a guy can learn all he needs to know on the subject by listening to Fox News for five minutes?
The fact that men like Prof. Rice, whose scholarship and research have won him a worldwide reputation as an expert on world agriculture, consider it an honor and a privilege to work on an international climate change panel should remind thinking people that climate change can only be studied profitably by meteorologists, climatologists and other qualified scientists.
Snap judgments on scientific matters based on gut reactions, political implications and/or potential economic consequences are worse than useless: they can prevent government action or skew the way government acts and worsen the problem they pretend to address.
The same people who wouldn’t dream of telling a brain surgeon how to remove a tumor, totally disregard the studies made and conclusions reached on the effects of releasing carbon dioxide and other so-called greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. They recognize the surgeon’s expertise and know they cannot possibly do what he does. They refuse to recognize the fact-based science practiced by the meteorologists, physicists, geologists and agronomists who, together, have reached conclusions about the effect man-caused activities — such as burning fossil fuels — is having on the weather.
Is every scientist always right? Of course not. But when a large majority of the pertinent scientific community accepts a theory that explains an ongoing set of events, that theory is most probably valid and in any event deserves respect and careful consideration.
TODAY, HOWEVER, as scientists coalesce around the climate change theory and the effects those changes will have on human civilization if not mitigated by lessening emissions, popular opinion is moving in the opposite direction. Most polls today show that the percentage of the public that accepts the science and agrees that emissions should be reduced is growing smaller rather than increasing.
Why? Possibly because what that segment of the public has come to believe is that reducing emissions of carbon dioxide — the primary greenhouse gas — will cost too much and that the benefits of emission reduction are too uncertain and too far in the future to justify paying the price — any price — today.
To compound the problem, what should be a scientific issue has been politicized. Because President Obama agrees with the science, Republican leaders oppose it. Not, of course, because the science is faulty, but because it would cost too much to put a brake on carbon dioxide emission. Which is another way of kicking the can down the road to the next set of decision-makers.
And because it is now politically correct for right-wingers to oppose the energy bill the House has already passed, their less responsible spokesmen fill the airwaves with utter nonsense about es-tablished meteorological science.
It is not a good year to be rational.
— Emerson Lynn, jr.
