Getting Real About Global Climate Change

In the first installment of the new season of HBO's "Real Time with Bill Maher," Maher addresses the current controversy over global warming with relative balance, even giving air to a recent column by George Will, which attempts to counter the current consensus on global warming that while it may be happening, it's not necessarily our fault and it's not necessarily a bad thing.

Though I think Will is protecting some secret interests of his, he does raise an interesting question: "Are we sure the climate at this particular moment is exactly right, and that it must be preserved, no matter the cost?"

He raises two points in this question. The first is whether we humans are acting with hubris by saying the climate as it is now is optimal enough to attempt to maintain it. Who are we, after all, but simple bipeds wandering this shimmering orb for but a moment, to think we should try to control the forces of nature? Global warming, Will maintains, could merely be part of a natural cycle of troughs and peaks of temperature. "Was life better when ice a mile thick covered Chicago? Was it worse when Greenland was so warm that Vikings farmed there?" he asks. (Since the former was 25,000 years ago and the latter a millenium removed from us, meaning sugarless gum was still in its infancy, I'd say yes and no. Or rather, no and yes.) Does the Earth know better than we what it needs?

On the show, Maher's guest, former HP CEO Carly Fiorina said "How sad if 90% of the species on the Great Barrier Reef perished within the next 25 years. That would be a bad thing." If one follows Will's reasoning to its logical conclusion, one would have to assume the opposite, that the death of those species is what is meant to happen, just as other climatic shifts in previous epochs have meant the extinction of other species. And that interfering with the cycles of Earth's climate is not to be done. Now George goes all crunchy granola on us -- just when people want to use our human powers of reason and ingenuity to try to repair some of the damage past efforts of human ingenuity have inflicted -- or to at least reduce the damage we continue to inflict. Now conservatives decide Earth's natural order must be respected. How convenient.

However, at the core level, I think Will's question deserves an answer. Perhaps this warming would be happening anyway, regardless of what humankind has pumped into the atmosphere. Perhaps carbon emissions do have an accelerating effect, but they merely speed our arrival at a temperature that would have been reached any way due to natural causes. Or perhaps their accelerating effect isn't as strong as we might believe.

The second part of Will's question refers to the price tag for reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Clearly, solving a technology problem on such a massive, global level will require the investment of billions upon billions of dollars. Here, like Fiorina, I take a pragmatic view. My reading leads me to believe our meddling with the atmosphere is responsible in large part for the changing weather patterns we are seeing and it's time to fix what we've broken, or at least to stop breaking it.
As Fiorina puts it, "the risks of doing nothing are far greater than the risks of doing something, so let's do something." What's more, she continues, there are so many benefits that could accrue from doing something: "We might reduce our dependence on foreign oil, we might ignite a cycle of innovation in this country -- and that's a good thing." (At least for technology companies that will benefit from the investment required to attack this problem.) Why not invest more money in new energy technologies instead of new military technologies, which are designed to help us wrest the old energy technology from the people who live on top of much of it. The innovations we develop along the way to creating new sources of energy might turn out to be just as important as the energy itself.