Climate Change: Skeptics Step Aside
Anthony Costello
Many of us have prior experience of scientific skepticism and denial about the health consequences of HIV infection and tobacco use. When scientists doubted the link between HIV and AIDS, and influenced policy-makers in South Africa to delay treatment rollout, there were at least 300,000 unnecessary deaths. The link between tobacco and lung cancer was denied for nearly 50 years by tobacco companies and apologists, despite huge loss of life.
Climate skeptics had a brief respite this winter. The media had a bonanza with the e-mails leaked from the UK University of East Anglia climate research group hinting at some kind of conspiracy to withhold climate data, followed by the admission by Dr. Rajendra Pachauri, director of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) that there had been an error about the rate of Himalayan glacier melting in their last report.
But the summer is here and climate issues have not gone away. Skeptics and contrarians in the scientific community are a tiny minority - a recent Stanford University study shows they comprise at most 3 percent of the field. So we should spend little time debating climate change denial.
