Cliff Berg
Jul 23, 2017 · 2 min read

Mr. Romm — Hubris was indeed accurate, and you demonstrate it. It is well intentioned — you don’t even realize it.

By labeling someone a “denier”, you seek to discredit their concerns, silencing them. Perhaps they have valid concerns that you don’t understand, because you have not actually listened to them.

I am not talking about the extremist elements — listening to them is a waste of time. But there are legitimate points of view on both sides of this issue.

Most people who you lump together as “deniers” are not actually that — they don’t deny that the Earth is warming, and that the cause is anthropogenic. They are not deniers of this.

The point of disagreement is the level of alarm that is warranted.

The sea is rising about 3mm/year. In 100 or 1000 years, it will have risen by several yards. New York City will have to build a wall around itself, and it will. Parts of Florida will probably flood. However, on those timeframes, the Earth has natural climate cycles that dwarf the warming that we have seen recently. In fact, those cycles indicate that we are due for another ice age. The idea that if only we could stabilize the CO2 level, and that the climate would then become stable, is completely untrue. Check out this graph. Even the large change of the past 100 years is but a tiny blip if you step back and look at the timeframe of millennia.

Is global warming cause for concern today? — especially given the other things that there are to worry about? It is, but I myself am far, far more concerned about artificial intelligence, nanotechnology, and desktop genetic engineering. Those threats are much more immediate. Climate change is a problem, but it is at the bottom of my own worry list.

The last time the sea level rose, humans were living amid glaciers. The Laurentide ice sheet covered North America, and most of Europe was a glacier as well. Climate changed, and people migrated. That’s what humans have always done. We will do it again. It did not wipe us out.

All the alarm is politically driven. It is a wedge issue, driven by those who control the debate: those on both sides who stir up emotion around this are responsible for part of the division that exists today. And people — like yourself — who label those who have different opinions, and who try to silence or discredit points of view without actually understanding those points of view, do harm to us all — harm that is ultimately more damaging than global warming.

    Cliff Berg

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    Author and IT consultant