John Gruber posts about the debate over climate change and I think he has a point about the media intentionally placing a bias in a debate in an attempt to be balanced – thereby positively discriminating for the point of view which has less evidence, less popular support.
The Kevin Drum footnote illustrates it perfectly.
100% of climate scientists believe global warming is happening. Something like 98% of them believe that it’s mostly caused by humans. But I’m giving our survey respondents a break, since I suspect most people automatically think “human-caused global warming” whenever they hear “global warming.”
The language used is important. From my point of view I don’t want to get drawn into a debate over what is causing globe warming but rather what we are going to do about.
Reducing emissions and waste products in the environment might help. They might help because we don’t know where we are in the equation. We could be near a tipping point (as the overly dramatic and very fun “The Day After Tomorrow” movie showed) or it could be decades away.
More importantly and core to my concern is what do we do for human society to continue. We can argue all day what’s causing glacial ice to melt but I’m more interested in what this will cause? Rising sea levels? We already have flooding in some coastal areas. Will this get worse?
Stop debating the why and who and start debating the what and the when.