the science according to murkowski

How do you explain climate change to a skeptical public?
U.S. Sen. Lisa Murkowski spoke at the Alaska Municipal League's climate change conference yesterday, largely about the details of the Lieberman-Warner climate bill and recent changes to it, but also about her reasons for supporting some kind of climate bill at all. She and Sen. Ted Stevens have long acknowledged changes in Alaska's climate, but both still publicly question a human role in them. Here, according to a written version of her speech, Murkowski seems to be very carefully making a case for action without beating anyone over the head with the IPCC findings. First she talks about all the changes Alaskans are seeing in the land, snow and ice, and plants and animals.

. . .What we can’t know for sure, is whether the changes are the result of a natural climate variation caused by an increase in radiation from the sun, a wobble in the earth’s orbit, or a change in Atlantic and Pacific ocean currents that is dragging warmer water into the Arctic Ocean. We certainly know the latter is happening. What we don’t know is whether the ocean current changes are a symptom of climate change or a cause of it.

Scientists, who have worked on the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, certainly believe the ultimate cause is the documented increase in man-made carbon dioxide and other so-called greenhouse gases that we have added to the atmosphere since the dawn of the industrial revolution.

The scientific case is strong that carbon emissions will raise a planet’s temperature, just look at Mercury. But since mother nature, due to volcanic eruptions, ocean warming, or permafrost thaw, can pump so much more carbon into the atmosphere than man can, for some there is an issue whether it makes sense for us to spend vast amounts to reduce our carbon emissions, since natural or worldwide emissions can dwarf whatever Americans do to eliminate or reduce carbon emissions. For them adaptation, not prevention is key.

I personally am of the belief that we should move to cut carbon emissions where we can without harmful costs to our economy and way of life, even if only as an insurance policy against significant atmospheric change, and because it might help to lower those adaptation costs in the future. We should do it just in case all those computer models and all those horror stories about sea level rise, ocean acidification, permafrost melt, killer hurricanes, deepening drought, global starvation and civil unrest may actually occur. . . .

Click here to read the full speech.