Andrew Revkin, who has been covering climate change for the NYTimes for going on twenty years, stirred up a controversy with his latest piece on an emerging "middle stance"
on global warming.
On the left hand side of the dial, the likes of David Roberts, my editor at Grist, labeled this as "High Broderism," and complained that Revkin has given too much credit to Roger Pielke, Jr., for self-righteously claiming a dubious middle ground between alarmists (such as Al Gore) and deniers (such as fossil fuel thinktankers).
I haven't seen a reaction on the right hand side of the dial, but in academia, Matt Nisbet has praised it to the skies as a "useful heuristic" for journalists, ignoring the fact that no reporter worth his salt would be caught dead using such a pretentious word. (Why is it that academics who can't speak conversational English think they have the right to lecture reporters on how to write?)
Here's my two cents. I hugely respect Andrew Revkin, but I don't think this is one of his better pieces. Not because it's wrong-headed--it's not--but because it doesn't go far enough to be very useful.
It's a fact that many scientists who know that global warming is real nonetheless question the practicality of global measures such as the Kyoto Protocol, not to mention that of even smaller emissions-reducing measures such as AB 32 in California. It's also true that many of these same scientists would like to see more emphasis put on taking out "insurance" against global warming, instead of trying to stabilize the global atmosphere.
But the problem is, Revkin doesn't take us to the next logical step in the debate, which is to look--even briefly--at these sort of ideas for "insurance" against global warming.
The most obvious of these "insurance policies" is an idea that Pielke, Jr., has often mentioned on his useful Prometheus site, which is simply to find ways to keep people out of harm's way of hurricanes.
This exact idea just happened to come up this week from Max Mayfield, who is retiring from a career of thirty-four years as an expert in hurricanes and disaster preparedness. Mayfield, known as a voice of calm and reason, is frustrated beyond belief at our nation's inability to face the facts of hurricanes. He's warning of 10,000 or more deaths from a direct hit by a hurricane on Southern Florida, pointing to the state's "7 million coastal residents." On Wednesday he said:
"We're eventually going to get a strong enough storm in a densely populated area to have a major disaster. I know people don't want to hear this, and I'm generally a very positive person, but we're setting ourselves up for this major disaster."
In fact, the only real "insurance" policy to prevent disaster from hurricanes that I know of has come, appropriately enough, from the insurance industry itself, which (as discussed in a Washington Post piece linked to below) is changing its policies to discourage development in along known hurricane paths in Florida and along the East Coast.
The frustration of Mayfield and Pielke, Jr. and other scientists who want us to pay attention to the obvious steps to be taken to reduce risks is understandable, but although Revkin's story hinted that broader attempts to reduce the risk of global warming may not be effective, it failed to show us that attempts to take out "insurance policies" have been equally ineffectual.
In that sense, it failed to advance the discussion, which is a shame, since it's true that this debate is mired in misunderstandings (such as the idea that global warming is a problem easily solved).
