From Nick Palmer, spokesman, Jersey Climate Action Network.
THANK you for publishing our ‘Dirty Harry’ letter (JEP, 22 August). Unfortunately, my omission of quotation marks on the (verbatim) presentation extract from Richard Lindzen made it appear as if the numbered paragraphs 1, 2 and 3 were my words instead of Lindzen’s.
The point of the quote was to show, by using his own words, that the most prominent credible climate change sceptic around is nowhere near as far apart from the IPCC (inter-governmental panel on climate change) position as people who have been bamboozled by the propaganda may believe.
However, my concluding paragraph did not originally say ‘the punk survived’, as you printed, but rather ‘the punk died’, which changes the meaning somewhat.
In the film, Callaghan gave the same ‘do you feel lucky, punk?’ speech to two different punks – the first was lucky, the second (at the movie’s climax), to whom I was referring, was not. I was attempting to suggest that those who choose to believe the climate change nay-sayers, propagandists and deniers are not only recklessly endangering their own futures, but everyone else’s as well.
If people are concerned about the reality of the climate change ‘Magnum’, and they are not sufficiently expert to fully judge the science for themselves, then they can clear the ambiguity by asking what would happen if each side was wrong, yet that side went on to win the popular vote and determined policy.
If majority climate science turns out to be wrong, then we will suffer few or no climate problems but the action we would have ‘unnecessarily’ taken would have already started to free us from dependence on foreign fossil fuel and would also be what we needed to do anyway to cope with the looming problems that Peak Oil and global population will bring. Hardly a disastrous result.
On the contrary, if the deniers are wrong and the worst that the IPCC predicts happens, then we could certainly wave bye-bye to our currently comfortable lives and would face a world of billions of dislocated refugees, drought, desertification, food shortages, species extinctions and increasing ecosystem disruption, etc, not to mention central parts of the planet being rendered unlivable.
Seriously, who do you think deserves your trust? What looks like the best bet to protect your family? Do you feel lucky? Well, do you?
