Responding to climate change deniers can be tedious. It’s tough to know how to deal with people who form an opinion based on news sites and social media and value their own conclusions over those of the overwhelming majority of actual subject matter experts. Despite overwhelming amount of confirming evidence in the science community, we’ve seen a corresponding increase in skepticism over the validity of this independent peer reviewed body of work confirming the basic climate change findings. This excerpt from a letter from Governor Jerry Brown to Dr. Ben Carson on September 10
, 2015 is one way to respond:
“Please find enclosed a flash drive with the complete United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) ‘Synthesis Report,’ the concluding installment of the Fifth Assessment Report, published earlier this year. This report assessed over 30,000 scientific papers and was written by more than 800 authors representing 80 countries around the world who definitively concluded that “human influence on the climate system is clear and growing with impacts observed across all continents and oceans.”
This is just one of the thousands of reports authored by the world’s top scientists on the subject, including a study published last month by Columbia University, University of Idaho and NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies scientists that found climate change has intensified California’s drought, These aren’t just words. The consequences are real.
Please use your considerable intelligence to review this material. Climate change is much bigger than partisan politics.”
It occurs to me that there are plenty of others in the category we label as “deniers” who would benefit from becoming familiar with this massive body of research.
