Ralph Cicerone is the president of the National Academy of Sciences. On Friday, October 19, 2007, he was at UNH talking about global climate change and its human causes. Here is a picture from the talk:

The webcast of this excellent hour-long talk will be available (along with the slides) here. In this post I wanted to address only one of Dr. Cicerone’s points. He discussed the idea some people advance, that we don’t need to combat global climate change since there may be winners as well as losers, and perhaps we (however that is defined) will actually be winners. Dr. Cicerone disagreed, pointing out that we do not know what the outcome of unchecked climate change would be, thus it’s hard to predict who may benefit. We do know however, that significant disruptions would result from it. One simple example: due to rising ocean water levels parts of many coastal population centers would end up under water. For me the takehome message was this: claiming that inaction is a reasonable course of action, based on predictions of supposed winning outcomes for some regions or species, is irresponsible at best.

Andrew Kun

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