Point-Counterpoint has been one of my least-used categories and usually I designate silly posts in it. Today, I’d like it to be a bit more substantive.

Point:

On July 2, MIT professor of atmospheric science, Richard Lindzen, published an opinion in The Wall Street Journal stating, among other things, that there is no consensus in the scientific community about global climate change. His opinion, “Don’t Believe the Hype: Al Gore is wrong. There’s no ‘consensus’ on global warming,” can be read here.

Counterpoint:

UC San Diego professor of history of science, Naomi Oreskes, offers her rebuttal to Lindzen’s primary claim in today’s Los Angeles Times. Lindzen’s opinion critiqued Oreskes’ work and she has decided to defend herself. She claims that there actually is consensus among the majority of scientists that there is global warming and that human activities are at least partly responsible. You can read her piece, “Global Warming—Signed, Sealed and Delivered: Scientists agree: The Earth is warming, and human activities are the principal cause,” here.

My two cents:

I hesitate to present the material in such a binary fashion since from what I’ve read, the views on climate change are rather diverse. A continuum of views with differences in degree is probably more accurate than simply breaking the debate into two clearly delineated camps. I chose to post this as a point-counterpoint becuase these two scientists are directly addressing one another. Finally, I wish that scientists had better public-relations firms. As it stands, it seems most of Americans receive the news about scientific research concerning climate change through politicians and pundits, who though they may be right, can easily be cynically dismissed as having an agenda. I appreciate that scientists don’t want to dumb down their work, but I would hope that they would be able to put it in language most of us can understand.