Is Global Warming a Crisis?

James Annan weighs in:

This debate has been discussed at length on RC already, but the audio is up on the web so I had a listen to it - all 90 minutes. The only real surprise was that any scientists would try to oppose the motion - that "global warming is not a crisis" - and it's only to be expected that they would struggle. Of course it's not a "crisis", but rather a long-term problem. There is nothing special about this year, or even this decade, compared to the previous or next, other than that it happens to be the one we are currently in. In fact the entire problem centres on the fact that climate change is a long-term issue, rather than something that can come to a turning point and be resolved.


I agree. What we do now or tommorow is much less important than what we do over the next twenty or thirty years. As a planetary disease, it's more like high blood pressure than a heart attack.

Habitat destruction, on the other hand, *is* a crisis. We probably have less than ten years to prevent massive loss of species in the vanishing rain forests.

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