Gregg Easterbrook has long been a foot-dragger in the global warming
debate. He's positioned himself as an optimist and a pragmatist and a
non-alarmist. In practice that has meant knocking the Kyoto Treaty
and, as an ostensibly liberal or at least centrist global-warming
skeptic, providing cover for
anti-environmentalists -- sort of like how Joe Lieberman's support
of the Iraq war has provided the Bush administration with a fig-leaf
of bipartisanship.
So on one level we should applaud Easterbrook's
piece on yesterday's New York Times op-ed page declaring that,
yes, he is finally now persuaded that global warming really is a
problem, that all the returns are finally in and the weight of
scientific evidence now overwhelmingly points to human activities as
a major factor in the climate change we've begun to witness. "Based
on the data, I'm now switiching sides regarding global warming, from
skeptic to convert," he wrote.
I'm glad Easterbrook has chosen to declare his change of heart so
publicly. But, you know, one thing we expect from pundits is that
they be just a little bit ahead of the curve. Easterbrook's
11th-hour conversion may provide some useful fodder in the propaganda
battle against right-wing ostriches. In my book, it also discredits
his further pronouncements on this topic.
His early call on global warming -- don't worry yet, things
will probably work out okay, there's still hope it's all just
statistical noise -- was dead wrong. The people he derided as
alarmists were right. So pardon me for suggesting that it is now time
for Easterbrook to hang up his hat as an expert on this subject. I
don't want to hear his latest recommendations against Kyoto or his
endorsement of carbon-trading schemes as the only solution to the
problem. There are other people I trust a lot more, because they made
the right call on this issue when it was a lot harder to make.
Pundits make risky guesses all the time. Those that guess right
over time gain credibility; those who guess wrong ought to lose it.
To express this in terms the market-loving Easterbrook can
understand, it's the risk/reward mechanism as applied to information.
For example: Saying "Google is important!" today, or any time over
the last several years, doesn't win you any points. Those of us who
said
it back in 1998 -- when the conventional wisdom of the
bubble-dazzled industry was that search engines didn't matter anymore
-- perhaps earned a little extra credibility when the prediction
proved correct. Observers who accurately predicted the likely outcome
of the invasion of Iraq -- like Thomas Powers -- are going to get a
fuller hearing from me than those who cheered the ludicrous
"cakewalk" talk and pooh-poohed the difficulty of rebuilding the
nation post-Saddam.
So, as we struggle to figure out how to deal with global warming,
I will continue to ask, "Why should I listen to Gregg Easterbrook?",
and place my bets on the observers who put their careers on the line
to sound an early alarm -- people like Bill McKibben, and, yes, Al Gore.
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