Climate Change Debate Rages Everywhere Except in Scientific Circles

The terms “global warming” and “climate change” have now become synonymous with liberal politics and intertwined with religion.

Hardison, a parent of seven here in the southern suburbs of Seattle, has himself roiled the global-warming waters. It happened early this month when he learned that one of his daughters would be watching “An Inconvenient Truth” in her seventh-grade science class.

“No you will not teach or show that propagandist Al Gore video to my child, blaming our nation — the greatest nation ever to exist on this planet — for global warming,” Hardison wrote in an e-mail to the Federal Way School Board. The 43-year-old computer consultant is an evangelical Christian who says he believes that a warming planet is “one of the signs” of Jesus Christ’s imminent return for Judgment Day.

Yet while Democrats and Republicans fight over the existence and causes of global warming, in Sweden Al Gore has indirectly brought together the left and the right.

“A prerequisite for winning the Nobel Peace Prize is making a difference, and Al Gore has made a difference,” Conservative Member of Parliament Boerge Brende, a former minister of environment and then of trade, told The Associated Press.

Brende said he joined political opponent Heidi Soerensen, of the Socialist Left Party, to nominate Gore as well as Canadian Inuit activist Sheila Watt-Cloutier before the nomination deadline expired Thursday.

Now that climate change has been determined to “very likely” be caused by human activities (in a report released today by the IPCC) no doubt that the debate will continue.

Achim Steiner, executive director of the United Nations Environment Programme (Unep), said the findings marked a historical landmark in the debate about whether humans were affecting the state of the atmosphere.

“It is an unequivocal series of evidence [showing that] fossil fuel burning and land use change are affecting the climate on our planet.”

And while prominent conservative journalists offer interesting solutions:

I can give you 20-in-2: Tax gas to $4 a gallon. With oil prices having fallen to $55 a barrel, now is the time. The effect of a gas-tax hike will be seen in less than two years, and you don’t even have to go back to the 1970s and the subsequent radical reduction in consumption to see how. Just look at last summer.

Exxon-Mobil continues to bribe scientists to deny their own findings.

Scientists and economists have been offered $10,000 each by a lobby group funded by one of the world’s largest oil companies to undermine a major climate change report due to be published today.

Letters sent by the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), an ExxonMobil-funded thinktank with close links to the Bush administration, offered the payments for articles that emphasise the shortcomings of a report from the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

We can all do some little things that can make a big impact. You can give your home an online energy audit, unplug your charged cell phones, and set your computers to stand by or shut them down when not in use.