You Ought to Have a Look is new a feature from the Center for the Study of Science posted by Patrick J. Michaels and Paul C. (“Chip”) Knappenberger. While this section will feature all of the areas of interest that we are emphasizing, the prominence of the climate issue is driving a tremendous amount of web traffic. Here we post a few of the best articles and essays in recent days, along with our color commentary.
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We have a couple of new introductions to make to our You Ought to Have a Look line-up.
We’re big fans of Daniel Botkin. He is an environmental biologist with a panoramic view of nature. He started his career as a forest modeler (that’s someone who predicts the future composition and structure of forests) and was a Government-Issue global warmer. Since then, he has written 16 books on the environment and has become a champion lukewarmer—a person who, like us, synthesizes the climate data and comes to the hypothesis that warming will be modest and readily adapted to. On May 29, he testified before the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, on systematic problems with the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. On June 18, he was before a subcommittee of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee.
Botkin has a thought-provoking piece this week in the National Parks Traveler—a website dedicated to all things National Parks. In his article, he critiques a report issued by the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) with the predictably alarming title, “National Landmarks at Risk: How Rising Seas, Floods, and Wildfires Are Threatening the United States’ Most Cherished Historic Sites.” The paleolithic media were all over the UCS report when it came out six months ago, and it headlined several news shows on the dinosaur networks. For “balance,” we managed a few soundbites.
Botkin’s article is more in-depth than the UCS report, concluding that human-caused global warming gets far more attention than it deserves in the universe of environmental issues, which precludes appropriate attention to real issues.
Botkin writes:
However, global warming has become the sole focus of so much environmental discussion that it risks eclipsing much more pressing and demonstrable environmental problems. The major damage that we as a species are doing here and now to the environment is not getting the attention it deserves.
You ought to have a look at Botkin’s complete article!