A voice in the environmental wilderness advocates common sense regarding climate change

Climate change is real. Anyone who says otherwise isn't playing fair with the facts.

But climate change hysteria is real, too. Every time you hear about this being "the hottest year (or month, or whatever) on record," bear in mind that the "record" only goes back about a century. The conclusions reached based on that record are far more subjective and interpretive than the media are willing to admit. The exclusion of non-human factors in climate change is often quite arbitrary, and pretty much every prediction of future threats to the existence of our species is based on a dubious extrapolation of the relatively small amount historical climate data we actually have back over eons during which we have no way of knowing that variables of which we have no idea were not in play. The similarity in backgrounds, beliefs, ideologies, and assumptions among scientists, as among so many professions which we look to for information and guidance, compromises the critical safeguard of peer review. The criticisms and analysis of people with attitudes so uniformly similar to those of the scientists who publish papers and studies cannot help but undermine the value of that crucial element of scientific truth-seeking, and more and more people are beginning to realize that.

None of this is to deny that the planet is in an ecological crisis. Species are going extinct at an appalling rate and in many cases are under desperate and serious threat. But exaggerating the dangers is simply not an effective way to present them. It undermines the credibility of scientifically sound, accurate, and desperately urgent warnings from the relatively small group of climate scientists we have.

Michael Shellenberger has strong credentials as an environmental activist. In this article in Forbes magazine, he points out that climate scientists themselves are beginning to see the dangers of exaggerated climate alarmism, and pushing back against the tendency to resort to scare tactics. We live in a polarized society, and climate change is one of the issues on which we are most polarized. That ought not to be, and just as in all the other issues concerning which all nuance and sense of proportion has been lost and the debate reduced to extremists screaming at each other, polarization not only prevents us as a society from coming to terms with the issues as they actually exist but makes the finding of actual solutions all but impossible.

It has been said that the difference between a debate and an argument is that a debate is about what is right, whereas an argument is about who is right. Climate change is one of many issues that are simply too serious to be arguments when we need to be having substantive debates.