Dear colleagues,
I will be repatriated to Santa Fe soon and look forward to seeing you in October. In the meantime, could you possibly help me with the following. Clark University is proposing a forum on climate change. I want that forum to be honest, so I am wondering if anybody in this group can propose me the names of some skeptics who are sober, thoughtful, and have not resorted to throwing snowballs in the senate, so I could propose those names to the convening committee. My thought was that in a forum on climate change, which would include, of course, many sessions on consequences and remediation, should be at least one in which the whole consensus is put in doubt. My note to the committee is appended below, in case you are curious. Nick Nicholas S. Thompson Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology Clark University http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/ My fear here is that this will be one of those discussions where the choir sings to itself. In Santa Fe, I sit with a group of highly trained engineers and hard scientists among whom are a few who are climate-change doubters. These are folks who seem otherwise rational, so I have to take them seriously. Now, I think it's fair to say that every conversation amongst the climate change faithful should not be gummed up by a few folks who doubt that it is happening at all. For instance, we need to talk amongst ourselves about justice issues, How to respond so that its consequences will not fall disproportionately upon the weak and poor, However, I also think we should devote at least one session to bridging the gap between doubters and us faithful. I suggest a session title, "Can a rational person doubt human-originated climate change?" and see who you can find that can explore the weaknesses in our consensus with the hope that such testing will make us more rational.
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