Richard Lindzen, the Alfred P. Sloan professor of meteorology at MIT, attracted a sizeable crowd for his global warming discussion at Colgate University last week. Lindzen's visit to campus was sponsored by Colgate's Center for Ethics and World Societies.
By disproving scientific statements regarding the negative impacts of climate change, he attempted to show that global warming poses no imminent threat.
"Confusion and illogic are at the heart of the global warming alarm," said Lindzen.
Lindzen's skeptical view on climate change was hard for some audience members to swallow as they pointed out current scientific, political, and ethical beliefs indicating global warming is a major problem.
His viewpoints are contradictory to those of Tim Flannery, a global warming activist, who spoke at Colgate a few weeks ago. First-year students were required to read Flannery's book, The Weather Makers, which details the causes and effects of global warming, and what we can do to prevent permanent damage to our environment.
It's interesting and beneficial to hear two such strong and opposing arguments on the same subject. Flannery explains that diminishing rain forests, ice sheets melting, coral bleaching of the Great Barrier Reef, and animal extinctions can all be connected to global warming. However, Lindzen insists that these events cannot solely be linked to a slight temperature increase and there are separate causes for each one.
After listening to both sides of the debate, I offer you these questions to consider: Should uncertainty prevent us from taking action? What happens if we sit back and then find in 50 years that temperatures have significantly risen? Is it a waste to spend so much time, energy, and money to then discover that Lindzen was right? Or, if we do cut back carbon dioxide emissions and then temperatures remain relatively the same, will it be because we fixed the problem or because there was no problem to begin with?