Get Off My Lawn, Global Climate Change Edition

There's not really much to say about Hering anymore, at least not for me.

I mean, what do you say to something like this:

Having won the Nobel Peace Prize, Al Gore said: “We face a true planetary emergency. The climate crisis is not a political issue, it is a moral and spiritual challenge to all of humanity.”

A crisis?

The word has been overused in recent years. But if we take it at its real meaning, we must do something. Now. A crisis doesn’t last long. It tips one way or the other in a short time. The Cuban Missile Crisis was real. If it had gone the wrong way, it could have ended in a nuclear war. For a couple of weeks there in October 1962, the survival of the world hung in the balance. Then the crisis was resolved.

If the climate is having a crisis, we should know the outcome in a couple of months at most.

If the issue is not resolved by then, if in fact we keep droning on about it for the rest of our lives, then it’s not a crisis at all.

It might be a problem — like overpopulation or the world gradually running out of oil — but it’s not an emergency that we have to overcome right now. We can deal with it as we learn how, as long as we’re not rushed into the wrong approach by the likes of Al Gore. (hh)

A couple of months? Obviously, he has no idea what kind of time frame climatologists use.

Second, he's either missing or omitting one of the major points around climate change: that actions humans take now are cumulative, and have effects that extend for hundreds of years - so yes, what we do now is important even if the planet's atmosphere doesn't completely destabilize tomorrow.

And that last dig - "not rushed into the wrong approach" - has got to burn the thousands of scientists who have been working on global climate change for decades. One would think the evidence they've gathered is worth something, anything.

Oh well - it's not like Hasso will have to deal with it.

I always thought that editorials were supposed to include some level of research on the part of the author, but Hering is really proving me wrong.

h/t MS.