The Global Warming Debate

Staten Island, N.Y.

Your article on global warming and the efforts of naysayers to deflect concern was excellent. Widespread awareness and concern is a necessary first step toward taking action to alleviate global warming’s effects. Unfortunately, many of these damaging effects have already passed their tipping points, whereby the effects themselves serve to accelerate the progression of damage—known as positive feedback. Helpful as it was, however, your article failed to mention the role played by population growth. Simply put, more people means more emissions of greenhouse gases to warm the atmosphere and less forest cover to help slow the catastrophic floods we can expect. As with global warming, we need widespread awareness and concern before effective action can be taken to rein in the population monster. If we fail to do so, nature will impose its own cruel controls. Denial and delay only magnify this problem, too.

John Blake,

Hollister, Calif.

Sharon Begley’s smug dismissal of “Greenhouse Doubters” suggests that NEWSWEEK’S editors are convinced that human-caused global warming is underway and that humans ought to do something to counter it. Unfortunately, the viability and costs of doing things that may substantially cut atmospheric greenhouse gases don’t get much attention from Begley or anyone else. I suspect that most greenhouse “doubters” might accept that the planet is warming a bit if they didn’t sense partisan politics in the mix. It’s also my guess that if key Democrats took global warming seriously enough to begin bucking those in their party who loathe nuclear energy, many doubters would convert. Indeed, countries like France, Japan and Finland already know that nuclear power is the only realistic answer to controlling atmospheric carbon in a future with more people. This is, of course, because the seminal inconvenient truth is that nuclear power is the only realistic way to produce the large amounts of the carbon-free hydrogen fuel necessary to fuel modern civilization. Yet until America’s leaders actually lead us in this direction (Bush has called for an expansion of nuclear-power capabilities), attempts to deal with global climate change will seem to many Americans to be partisan “politics as usual”—with the credibility of all science held at constant risk.

Mike Rethman