A Convenient Half-Truth

Excuse me for losing my cool, but man I'm sick of the climate-change scare-mongering like this recent post by the Sightline Institute's Eric De Place.

Sure, blogs are a casual venue, but organizations like the Sightline Institute or knowledgeable folks like Al Gore, who spuriously linked the Hurricane Katrina disaster to climate change in "Inconvenient Truth," should hold themselves to higher standards than these convenient half-truths.

Is climate change real? It's beyond discussion. Will climate change result in changes in global precipitation patterns? You bet. Will there be more precipitation in the Pacific Northwest? Maybe, maybe not. Would major floods occur in the absence of climate change? For sure.

And there are more immediate causes to flood disasters that are critical to address, especially in light of climate change. The half-truths of "[insert disaster here] was caused by climate change" does nothing to build this awareness. If anything it distracts from this awareness and serves to reduce the credibility of climate science that is based on entirely different (and more reliable) data, showing that CO2 emissions have and are changing our climate.