In addition to the one in Congress, this one was between skeptics and believers in New York, as reported by the Scientific American Magazine blog:
March 15, 2007
Debate Skills? Advantage: Climate Contrarians
Last night at the Asia Society and Museum, a panel of notables debated the merits of the proposition "global warming is not a crisis." Arguing for the motion were the folksy (and tall) Michael Crichton, the soft-spoken Richard Lindzen and the passionate Philip Stott. Arrayed against were the moderate Brenda Ekwurzel, the skeptical Gavin Schmidt and the perplexed (by the inanity of the contrarians' arguments) Richard Somerville. (Note: all the adjectives are mine.)
The hosts--the Rosenkranz Foundation and Intelligence Squared U.S.--asked the audience to vote both prior to and after the event. Early voting skewed heavily against the motion: 57 percent in the audience favored dismissing it while only 30 percent supported it. But that was before anybody opened their mouths.
Robert Rosenkranz, chairman of the eponymous foundation, brought up the first bugaboo of the night in his introduction: "I am old enough to remember the consensus on global cooling." And the second: how can we know what the future climate will be when we can't even predict the weather a year in advance, something that would be worth billions of dollars?
1. As Somerville later pointed out, any consensus over global cooling was more in the media hype surrounding it than anything else.
2. Climate and weather are two separate things, climate being the average of weather over a given time period. We cannot say that it will be 76 degrees F next March 15 but we can say, based on atmospheric physics, that 20 years from now the month of March will, on average, be warmer than it is now.
As Lindzen noted in his opening remarks, the climate is always changing. The question is whether the warming we are currently experiencing--and every panelist agreed that warming was happening--is worrisome and/or manmade. For example, Lindzen argued that in a warming world we might expect less severe weather as a result of the decreased temperature difference between the poles and the equator. And he noted that India has warmed in recent decades yet its agricultural yield has increased.
(Perhaps Prof. Lindzen is not familiar with the Green Revolution?)
