Gingrich served up a moronic comment this week:
The age of the dinosaurs was dramatically warmer than this is right now and it didn’t cook the planet. In fact, life was fine.
Ben Adler gets a response from climate scientist Ralph Keeling:
Climate change is not about survival of life; it’s about survival of civilization. Sure, the planet has been warmer than anything we’re probably going to bring about, but that doesn’t mean it’s good.
It has to do with adaptation to a world that’s extremely different than the world today or anything civilization has experienced. [Gingrich] has misrepresented the threat. It’s not that the Earth is going to go up in smoke, or melt down. Life will survive and humans will probably survive. The question is whether the pillars of our civilization will survive: the ability to grow food, the ability to live in peace with your neighbors. If you neighbors can’t live on their land any more because the climate is intolerable, you have a problem. He’s assuming that the transition to a warmer world is harmless and it’s just like picking a flavor of ice cream in a store. You have to live with the transition.
And to my mind, there’s an obvious difference. Humans created this situation. We are devastating countless other species and precious ecologies. And we have absolutely no right to. Our duty is to pass on the planet to the next generation in as livable and beautiful a state as we inherited. Speaking as Gingrich did is to defend vandalism, not conservatism.
Update from a reader:
To be fair to Gingrich, Van Jones’ “cook the planet” was implying runaway climate change wiping out life, and it is an argument that exists out there. It is kind of important to know that we’re unlikely to hit some sort of geological tipping point that destroys life on earth with global warming; the fact that CO2 levels were much higher in the past is relevant to that; the experiment has actually been performed before. Climate change will still be catastrophic, but it is worth making the point that we aren’t going to become Venus here.
The Dish 