EARTHLY LOVE

WELL AHEAD OF EARTH DAY, NASA this week released this stunning high-definition image of Earth, taken from the newly launched Suomi satellite. What a glorious sight -- you can just feel the breezes wafting over the turquoise waters in the Gulf of Mexico shallows.

And the media are using the stunning images to bolster the case for the group who've been called "the deniers." A provocative op-ed in yesterday's Wall Street Journal, signed by 16 climate scientists, ran a related NASA photo  to assure us there's "no need to panic" about the dangers of CO2 in global warming.

In a follow-up online interview one of the signers, physicist William Happer of Princeton, argued that the UN's IPCC (Inter-Governmental Panel on Climate Change) computer models greatly exaggerate the predicted effects of CO2 on global warming, and we need to continue to monitor the situation for "decades" before the science can be definitively settled. The piece, by the way, spoke exclusively of CO2, and did not mention other environmental pollutants. 

What's an average citizen to believe? Empirically, the weather seems weird lately. Clearly the glaciers are receding all over the globe with startling speed: I have witnessed that personally. And I frequently read that only slightly warmer ocean temperatures can cause violent storms. The WSJ article did not mention this, but I have read elsewhere that the insurance industry is building that information into new models.

There are at least two scientists I plan to read. The first is a social scientist, Maxwell T. Boykoff, who argues in "Who Speaks for the Climate?" (November 2011) that the media's handling of climate change depends on how the issues are framed. The other is a climate scientist: Britain's Mike Hulme, author of  "Why We Disagree on Climate Change" (May, 2009).  Hulme says what we need is "dis-census," not consensus -- a multidimensional conversation about the physics of climate change, as well as responses to the humanitarian, ethical, and social issues that arise as we try to understand how to live on our planet.