Wednesday, January 19, 2005

The US and Climate Change

This is a subject that has been covered before. However, the US attempting to purge a UN plan on climate change of its references to climate change being a potential cause for future natural disasters irritates me all over again. One member of the US delegation to the conference on natural disasters said that "It's well known that there's controversy" about climate change. Well it wouldn't be well known if right-wing cranks that run this nation would actually believe in science and particularly the climatologists, of whom nearly 100% of them believe in global warming/climate change.

An interesting side point to the climate change "debate" is about credentials. The administration and others who are burying their heads in the sand on climate change use doubters who are "scientists." Well, they are often scientists and have a Ph.D. And evidentially that's enough. But if you look at the fields of many of the major scientific doubters of global warming, they are in physics, chemistry, and other fields where they know nothing about climatology. This is the equivalent of me as a historian doubting Einstein's theory of relativity. I don't have a damn clue what I'm talking about when discussing physics and neither do physicists when discussing climate change. Although we have a glut of PhD's in this country, it seems that the title still holds enough respect to make one an expert on any damn thing.

Once I finish my PhD, I'll be putting out my own diet plan, discussing the merits of hydrogen fuel cells, and writing a book rethinking psychotherapy. Because as a PhD, I'll be an expert in all of these fields.