Various public figures have been labeled climate change deniers. What are their actual positions on climate change?
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The Environment
Below is a list of 11 public figures described as “prominent climate deniers working actively to mislead the public and delay policy action to address climate change”...
More likely someone will be called a denier if he/she doesn't seem all that concerned about climate change or thinks its effects will be minor and manageable.
I’m guessing significance refers to predicted effects of global warming and what actions must be taken to mitigate or adapt to those effects. Thus, if you think the impact will be harmless or even beneficial, that puts you in the denier camp. If you take a “wait-and-see” attitude to global warming, confident that “a technological fix is bound to come along when we really need it, you’re a denier. Ditto anyone who advocates incremental and/or purely market-based approaches to climate change, because these approaches are just too wimpy given the enormity of the threat.
“Denial’ is more interesting. In contemporary usage, it assumes that what is denied is the Truth, as in: Denial: “refusal to acknowledge painful realities, thoughts, or feelings”.
Don’t get me wrong: there is a general scientific consensus that climate change is happening. But there’s no consensus on the rate or extent of global warming.
If you want to save water for dry years, it’s groundwater.
- Dr. Jay Lund, director of the UC Davis Center for Watershed Sciences
These considerations wouldn’t matter so much is there were no costs to actions/policies based on worst case scenarios. If all actions and their effects were equal, then go with the worst case! Nothing to lose and everything to gain!
Between increasing adoption of sustainable practices (e.g., cover crops, conservation tillage), precision farming and ever more resilient crops, agricultural productivity in the US and other developed counties is likely to maintain its upward trajectory.
So, per the IPCC, there is medium confidence in a 0 to -2% median yield impact per decade this century for the major crops (wheat, rice, and corn). There is high confidence the effect on crop production will be consistently negative in the low altitudes, while "climate change may have positive or negative effects in northern latitudes".
Why are large farms increasing? Partly because families are better able to handle the logistical and financial challenges of running big operations, thanks to labor-saving innovations that favor scale economies.
16. Expand captive breeding programs to improve genetic diversity of endangered species and develop genetically viable populations for eventual habitat return...
Poor farmers often lack the resources to maintain or improve the productivity of their land. As the soil becomes depleted, they will move operations if they can – leaving a used-up landscape behind...
One out of five plant species are threatened with extinction. Almost a quarter of mammal species are endangered. The situation is just as bad or worse for reptiles (21% endangered), amphibians (30%), fish (21%), insects (22%) and mollusks (41%). Birds are doing slightly better (“just” 12% endangered). Habitat loss is the main culprit.
We cannot escape risk, because we cannot stop change. So what was a safe bet before becomes a risky bet, because the variables keep shifting.
Rewilding is typically conceived as an act of restoration: bringing back species (or their proxies) that used to inhabit an ecosystem. Like cheetahs and mammoths (well, elephants) in North America. It’s ok, because they used to be here.
Protecting biological communities in specific locales is a worthy goal. Saving endangered species and creating robust habitats for them to thrive is another worthy goal. These goals are not always in perfect harmony.
The Copenhagen Consensus Center does research on the costs and benefits of various policy approaches to global problems and provides information on which policy targets will do the most social good relative to their costs – acknowledging that factors other than cost/benefit ratios are also important.
Acknowledging that ecosystems are in constant flux doesn’t mean all change is good. But it does change our conception of what’s at stake. It’s not about preserving a biological moment in a specific locale. It’s about saving species.
When the parts of a system are constantly changing, at what point do you say that the system is no longer itself? That may be easy to answer when the system is a living organism, which is either alive or dead. But ecosystems aren’t single organisms, so the either/or approach doesn’t really apply.