Munk Debates

Rob Joustra and I attended the Munk Debates last night at the new Koerner Concert Hall in downtown Toronto. It was an entertaining evening. Rob has written a good review of it on the Cardus After Hours blog.

It was obvious that the trick of the debate was to find a balance between actual rational/scientific heft and populist stage tactics designed to fling various kinds of mud in quasi-dignified ways.

There was a fair amount of common stock put in modelling future states of the global climate. My problem with that is the inherent difficulty (perhaps impossibility) of determining what the future state of a massively complex system like the global climate might be.

Weather isn't linear. Moving up the scale of complexity to climate doesn't improve things much. It's tricky to get a bead on precisely what the actual conditions are today, never mind being definitive about what the climate will be like in 50 years. Our use of resources and our incontrovertible wastefulness is evident all over the globe. The disparity around the planet doesn't require complex computer modelling to discern and remains a very critical issue.

I also wonder how average citizens are supposed to sort out all the rhetoric, expert mortar attacks, and climatologist personality wrangles in arriving at an informed and useful position. Add to the mix politicians and angling journalists and the confusion appears to be driving things toward some sort of darkly comic confusion.

Debates drive polarization and the effect of last nights encounter was to push things closer to a 50/50 split on the question of this being "the most pressing concern" that we face. The debate wasn't about climate issues being critical. Rather, it was about climate change being the most critical issue that we face.

I was disappointed that no one mentioned near-earth-objects. If a big enough chunk of rock hits us, change will be abrupt and cataclysmic - perhaps something new to worry about if you are feeling fatigue over the environment or H1N1 fear-mongering.