It is true that a majority of the scientists who study climatic tendencies in our atmosphere have arrived at the conclusion that the world’s climate is changing, and they have convinced a group of politicians, some of whom are politically powerful, of the truth of their conclusions.

A minority, however, is skeptical. Some believe that recent data that suggest that the average temperature of the atmosphere is going up can be explained by natural variations in solar radiation and that global warming is a temporary phenomenon. Others believe that the historical evidence indicating that the temperature of the atmosphere is going up at a dangerous rate is simply not reliable.

Such lacks of agreement are common in the sciences. They are reduced and eventually eliminated with the accumulation of new evidence and of more refined theories or even by completely new ones. Such debates can persist for a period of decades. Academics often throw invective at one another in these debates. But typically this does not mean much.

But the case of climate change is different. If the evidence indicates that global warming is progressive, is caused principally by our industrial processes, and will probably cause disastrous changes in our atmosphere before the end of the twenty-first century, then we do not have the time to verify precisely if this evidence is reliable. Such a process would be a question of many years of new investigations. And if the alarmist climatologists are right, such a delay would be tragic for all humanity.

The difficulty is that economic and climatologic systems are very complicated. They are not like celestial mechanics, which involves only the interaction of gravity and centrifugal force, and efforts to construct computerized models to describe these complicated systems simply cannot include all the factors that are influential in the evolution of these complicated systems.

All this does not necessarily indicate that the alarmist climatologists are not right. But it really means that if global warming is occurring, we cannot know exactly what will be the average temperature of our atmosphere in the year 2100 and what will be the average sea level of the world’s ocean in that year.

It also means that we cannot be confident that efforts by the industrialized countries to reduce the amount of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere will have a significant influence on the evolution of the world’s climate.

Alas, the reduction of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere would be very costly and would greatly change the lives of all the inhabitants of our planet–with the possibility (perhaps even the probability!) that all these efforts will be completely useless.

Harleigh Kyson Jr.

I also can’t bring myself to believe in a global capitalist conspiracy having extended its tentacles deep into economic science, trying to somehow keep the lid on “truth”–as indeed I don’t believe that “truth” is a proper category to apply for economics. There quite simply isn’t one right way to do things and the basis of choice between different alternatives is therefore never epistemological rather than utilitarian (or political, if you prefer that word). We don’t choose one economic system over the other because it would be somehow intrinsically better or “right” one, we choose them because we, for better or worse, want to achieve certain society over the others. And this means that if someone makes a theoretical point that is in favour of laissez-faire then it doesn’t necessarily follow that s/he is somehow ‘kept’ by capitalist establishment–it is quite possible to honestly believe that this is a desirable society to live in.

As to “diverting huge funds from real economy to Wall Street”–I would maintain that those huge funds were not diverted rather than created there. If you think for a moment what a derivative is–if for instance you and me agree to a bet on whether Dubai will be able to serve its debt or not, let’s say I bet you 50 cents to a dollar that it is, then would you say that what just happened was that you diverted a dollar and me 50c from the “real economy of Dubai”?

This would be akin to looking at the 1930s in Europe as a binary struggle between communism and liberal capitalism – which would make one to concede that Hitler must have been a capitalist.