The politicization of climate change - The Boston Globe

The politicization of climate change

Do the science

Bjorn Lomborg makes a strong case (“ The world can’t afford to politicize climate change research,” Opinion, May 6) against politicizing climate change research. Global efforts to combat climate change are clearly insufficient. As global emissions continue to climb, we cannot afford to ignore any potential tool or methodology.

Those who believe that climate change is a crisis should not attempt to restrict efforts to the sole goal of carbon neutrality. This is as close-minded as those who deny climate change altogether. It is unclear whether any of the multitude of geoengineering proposals have merit, but the only way to find out is to do peer-reviewed research on each of them. In other words, do the science.

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Science consists of hypothesizing, testing, analyzing, and learning. Rinse and repeat. We need more and better science to combat climate change. What we do not need are arbitrary restrictions.

Jonathan Quint

Goffstown, N.H.

The fossil fuel industry’s playbook

The title of the op-ed, “The world can’t afford to politicize climate change research” is disingenuous. Its content is as false as arguing that smoking is not harmful in rooms with air purifiers. Ironically it supports the political playbook of the fossil fuel industry:

▪ We must continue using fossil fuels indefinitely.

▪ There are no proven technologies enabling us to reduce our dependence on these fuels by 85 percent (there are, but deployment is being aggressively blocked by the fossil fuel industry).

▪ Instead, to tackle the impact of human-accelerated climate warming, we should invest in mitigating, not eliminating, fossil fuels and pursue geoengineering interventions in complex geosystems with unknown consequences.

We will eventually need to remove carbon dioxide already in the atmosphere after reducing our uses of fossil fuels to the minimum. Today removal is very far from reaching the required capacity of removing multiple billions of tons of carbon dioxide annually. Research to determine which methods are scalable and affordable is justified.

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Specifically, the idea of reproducing the effects of volcanic eruptions on temperature by releasing particulates and sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere is alarming. These very small particles will fall to earth, adding to those produced by the combustion of fossil fuels, which are already notorious sources of harm for human health and huge increases in the costs of health care. The Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution concludes after looking at one ocean-based geoengineering approach: “But it’s important to remember that such approaches do not replace the need for immediate and major reductions in the use of fossil fuels that produce carbon dioxide in the first place.”

Martyn Roetter

Boston

Project 2025′s plan for climate change research

Bjorn Lomborg bases his claim that climate change research is politicized on the suspension of a single geoengineering experiment at Harvard. His rhetoric focuses on what he terms an “intense backlash” despite the many other complex dimensions of the project that were detailed in its final report.

Lomborg goes on to argue against himself by pointing out the ongoing political support for work in the same domain as the Harvard experiment. He notes that both the Obama and Biden administrations invested substantially in geoengineering research. Furthermore, geoengineering continues at many US universities, including the University of Chicago (where the original lead investigator of the Harvard experiment now works) and at Harvard, whose Solar Geoengineering Research Program is alive and well. Apparently, the politics of geoengineering are not so seriously suppressing important academic research.

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If Lomborg had just one op-ed to give us about the politicization of climate research, he should have written how the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, a blueprint for a second Donald Trump term, proposes to stamp out climate research wherever it presently exists in the federal bureaucracy. Harvard’s solar geoengineering experiment is trifling in comparison to what conservative political ideologues have targeted for elimination if Trump is reelected.

Frederick Hewett

Cambridge