‘It’s mitigation, development and adaptation, all together’

Mike Kania, Erie County, Pa.: As a farmer, I believe that soil productivity is our most important natural resource and that we are squandering it. Geography is destiny as far as farming goes. You can’t just move agricultural production north into Canada as you quickly run into the Canadian Shield, whose solid surface bedrock makes farming almost impossible, no matter what the climate does. How can the facts and limitations of global soil productivity be factored into the climate change equation?

Stern: One central example would be the restoration of degraded land. That would store carbon in the soil, improve the productivity of land, and make agriculture more robust to difficult weather. It’s mitigation, development and adaptation all together. You may want to look at the recent publication “Growing Better” from the Food and Land Use Coalition, which provides a very interesting analysis and many examples.

Threats can bring people together, or drive them apart

Jacques Weissgerber, Brookline, Mass.: Could you bring to light the relationship between climate change and the current surge of nationalism and other right-wing ideologies, particularly in Europe and America? When a global crisis such as climate change should bring people together, what we are seeing instead is the intensifying of the contradictions between rich and poor, the developed and developing worlds, natives and immigrants. It’s a fertile ground for fascism.

Oreskes: I think history shows that when there is a threat, real or perceived, it can bring people together, but it can also be exploited to drive us apart. Right now, we are seeing both: millions of young people around the globe coming together to demand action on climate change, but also the fossil fuel industry — seemingly desperate to survive at all costs — contributing to social division. I don’t want to get too conspiratorial here, but I don’t think it’s a coincidence that Russia has been interfering in our internal politics on behalf of a president who claims that climate change is a hoax or that the company that leads the world in climate change denial is Exxon Mobil. The world’s largest untapped oil and gas reserves are in the Russian Arctic, and the company that has the contracts to drill them is Exxon Mobil.

‘Belief in the magic of the marketplace’

Michael Thieneman, St. Joseph, Mich.: Why can’t we accept the facts that science and nature provide us? If we look at history, Copernicus rethought the motion of our planets and postulated a different theory, Newton overthrew two centuries of thinking with his laws of motion. We don’t necessarily need an Einstein or Newton, but there seems to be an underlying barrier to exposing the effects of climate change in their fullest dimensions.

Oreskes: Public opinion polls show that most Americans do accept and trust science on most issues, but they selectively reject scientific findings that they think clash with their worldview, their religious commitments or their economic interests. In “Merchants of Doubt” (also written with Erik M. Conway) we showed that the original “merchants” were not so much motivated by money as by the ideology of market fundamentalism. They were so committed to a belief in the “magic of the marketplace” that they found it difficult, if not impossible, to accept evidence of market failure. And it was Nick Stern who said years ago that anthropogenic global warming was “the greatest and widest-ranging market failure ever seen.”

Even scientists sometimes have a hard time accepting how serious climate change really is. Scientists think it’s important for them to reach consensus, lest any disagreement be used as an excuse for inaction. This leads them to “least common denominator” conclusions, by which we mean relatively weak or anodyne claims that everyone can sign off on. Add to this a worldview that equates rationality with dispassion and it makes scientists leery of dramatic claims, even when the evidence points in their direction.