Summary

Most of us have taken a position on climate change.  How do we know what the facts are, and what solutions would be effective? Here is my position: I want a cure that is not worse than the disease.

For those who agree with, "The world is going to end in 12 years if we don't address climate change." virtually no cure would be too draconian. But do any rational people really believe we might have only 11 years and 10 months left before the world ends? Others are saying the world’s climate is always changing. This observation leads them to the conclusion that whatever we are doing now regarding protecting the planet is fine; all we need to do is keep it up and the earth will absorb the changes as it has always done.

For the next 10 minutes, we will talk about climate change, and what--if anything--to do about it.

Continuing

If anyone makes a prediction about climate change, a sales forecast, or a stock market or economic prediction, the first question we should ask is, “How have this person’s predictions turned out in the past?” To find out, we need to look at past forecasts, their predictions, and the actual results. Comparing those forecasts to actual results over time will give an A/F, actual over forecast, percentage. For example, if a salesperson has predicted an average of $100K in sales for each of the last 10 years, and has been averaging $82K for those years, he would have an A/F percentage of 82%. 82/100=.82. Any Sales VP would be well advised to multiply  any future sales forecasts from that person by .82, reducing the forecasts to a more realistic number, before forwarding them to the CEO.

Isn’t it even more important to look at the A/F, actual over forecast, when it comes to climate change? Here a few examples:

Al Gore’s 2006 movie, "An Inconvenient Truth", forecast dire climate scenarios. It was predicted that much of Florida and the San Francisco Bay would be underwater by now. The movie used horrifying footage from 2005's Hurricane Katrina, and suggested that climate change was the cause of frequent and more intense hurricanes. But since then, hurricane frequency has decreased, and the storms' intensity hasn't yet grown significantly. Gore also predicted in the film that, "Within a decade, there will be no more snows on Mount Kilimanjaro." University of Massachusetts scientist Doug Hardy, who was a co-author of a 2002 Science article upon which Gore's statement was based, notes that the former vice president was taking a bit of literary license, since research shows that the snow cover has come and gone seasonally there for at least a century and a half.

In 1989, a senior UN environmental official, Noel Brown, forecast that entire nations could be wiped off the face of the earth by rising sea levels if the global warming trend was not reversed by the year 2000. He added, “Shifting climate patterns would bring back 1930s dust bowl conditions to Canadian and US Wheatlands.”

In 1967, a best-selling book came out called “Famine 1975! America’s Decision: Who Will Survive?” It predicted mass starvation around the developing world due to increasing population. “Today’s crisis can move in only one direction – toward catastrophe,” it warned. Some experts praised the book and ridiculed doubters. “All serious students of the plight of the underdeveloped nations agree that famine is inevitable,” CalTech biology professor Peter Bonner wrote in a 1967 review of the book in the prestigious journal Science. The exact opposite of the book’s prediction happened. Famine deaths have plunged dramatically as farming technology and food distribution improved.

Global cooling was once a worry to many, such as University of California at Davis professor Kenneth Watt, who warned that present trends would make the world “eleven degrees colder in the year 2000,