Middle Ground On Global Warming?
He also gets a nice quote from Carl Wunsch, a climate and oceans expert at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. "Climate change presents a very real risk," says Wunsch. "It seems worth a very large premium to insure ourselves against the most catastrophic scenarios. Denying the risk seems utterly stupid. Claiming we can calculate the probabilities with any degree of skill seems equally stupid."
Many bloggers are celebrating Revkin's article and, with it, the possibility of a considered, reasoned debate about an issue that tends to inflame passions. (One calls it "An article I've been waiting years to blog.") But others are sticking to their guns. "What bothers me about the whole 'middle way' on this issue is that if the problem is truly reaching crisis proportions, the 'moderates' are mitigating any action that needs be taken NOW!," writes "Rocker." And then there are the cynics – or, perhaps, the realists. R. Pielke Jr. is one of them. "I fully expect that many of the usual suspects on the extremes of the debate (both sides) will respond to this story by saying that they've been in the middle all along," he writes.