image from Babble magazine

At the 11th hour, with the US and others saying they’d back the $100 billion dollar plan, a glimmer of hope appeared. And then disappeared. With any luck, the world might quickly organize a way to continue this conversation, reconvene and actually put something globally binding together in 2010. It currently doesn’t look hopeful. But it is still necessary. And so the question I have today is this: what will it take to salvage the work of COP15? Please note: this question is not rhetorical.

I keep getting questions about this from folks I know. This email cover-up: what are we to believe about climate change? Is it a trojan horse?
The email scandal is (mostly) a non-issue as far as I can see. While I haven’t  researched it extensively, Here’s what it looks like from here:

1) there’s a small amount of evidence which doens’t support the whole piece, but it’s relatively small in the face of everything else
2) The fact that the evidence doesn’t support isn’t really all that significant for the overall conclusions that the scientific community has drawn about climate change
3) Nonetheless, their reactions to it have been really bad and possibly included bad scientific method of not remaining as transparent as they should be
4) But they were transparent enough for science to do it’s job and the conclusions still hold (keep in mind that it’s not just fringe scientists that hold this together, it’s been vetted by the major, and conservative, scientific communities.)
5) Nonetheless, the media loves a controversy and people have a lot of intellectual and emotional reasons to want to deny climate change — and thus a molehill is turned into a mountain.

Ultimately, it comes down to risk management — even if one doesn’t feel certain that climate change will happen, the question is one of the cost of making a mistake in either direction. The cost of making a mistake if climate change is happening (which appears to be the case) vastly outstrip the damages of trying address it. In fact, trying address it makes for good sense even if climate change *isn’t* happening for the reasons outlined well in this article called Why Business Leaders Can Ignore Climate Deniers.

I also recommend this take on climate science for the lay person: a youtube video called How it All Ends.
(I think you’ll really enjoy this one.)

If 99 out of 100 doctors told me that my child would die if I didn’t take action, I wouldn’t focus my time on determining whether the 1 doctor might be right. I’d take immediate action to save my child’s life. And, in reality, this isn’t just an analogy.