This weekend I attended the Global Scholars Symposium , a conference for 9 prestigous scholarship programs for overseas students to study in the UK. One of my favourite speakers was Dr. Kumi Naidoo, the International Executive Director of Greenpeace, revealed a disturbing fact about the audience.
One of the audience questions posed to Dr. Naidoo was about the debate in the scientific community about climate change. Now this is supposed to be an audience of the leaders of the future, they are graduate students at some of the best universities of the world, many studied science or technology related fields. It is deeply disturbing that a significant number of this highly intelligent, highly educated group of people believe oil and gas company funded quackery on par with believing smoking doesn't cause cancer or that AIDS is not caused by HIV.
The evidence for climate change is plentiful, it is strong, and it is not new. Global warming was first brought to prominence in the 1980s (yup over 30 years ago). I shan't run through the all the evidence again but here is a nice summary refuting the claims made by deniers. Suffice to say, the thousands of climatologists, atmospheric scientists, ecologist, oceanographers, geographers, glaciologists, chemists, and mathematical modellers who have been studying the problem have considered every confounding or mitigating factors you (or the oil-company hacks) can think of and have found them wanting unless they also considering the billions of tons of CO2 emitted by humans (yes this includes: solar variation, volcanic activity, variation of Earth's orbit etc...).
This is not to say that geologic or ecological factors are irrelevant, on the contrary, it is becoming increasingly clear the positive feedbacks due to these processes will be very important in the future. It is entirely possible that the positive feedbacks from polar melting (decrease in sunlight reflected by white snow, release of methane and CO2 from melting permafrost, etc..) might result in a "point of no return" beyond which even if humanity could cut its emissions to zero it would not prevent irreversible global warming of >4oC.
So far our leaders have completely and utterly failed to address climate change. Sadly, if this conference is anything to go by we should not expect the leaders of the future to do any better.
