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Global warming advocates don’t care enough about global warming

Back in my days as an editor at Washington Monthly, we were taught to report on something colleagues called the "culture of bureacracy." This may sound like a snoozer topic, but the point is that you can learn a lot about how an institution is run by focusing on the little stuff: how fast it ...

By Christina Larson

February 11, 2010, 6:48 PM

Back in my days as an editor at Washington Monthly, we were taught to report on something colleagues called the "culture of bureacracy." This may sound like a snoozer topic, but the point is that you can learn a lot about how an institution is run by focusing on the little stuff: how fast it reacts to crises, how tasks get juggled, how promotions happen, etc.

So when trying to understand the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)’s recent woes — the U.N. climate body has recently come under fire for errors in its latest reports, including misstating the date by which Himalayan glaciers are expected to disappear — that’s the approach I took in reporting "Inside the Climate Bunker." My conclusion was that while the ambition and global importance of the climate panel is growing, its methods and resources are struggling to keep up. Confusion, if not orchestrated bias, is certainly evident.

Today Walter Russell Mead has published a lengthy and thoughtful online response to my article, "Global Warming Movement Wasn’t Ready For Prime Time," in which he draws out what he believes that tells us about the global movement to address climate change:

The problem isn’t that the global warming movement took global warming too seriously; it’s that so far they haven’t taken it seriously enough. They believe that the world is threatened by an imminent danger, yet they haven’t bothered to think through a comprehensive political strategy or developed a competent and reliable institution to persuade what must inevitably be a skeptical world opinion that they are right.

While we do have some difference of opinion on the topic, I believe Mr. Mead has beautifully distilled the movement’s inattention to the neccessity and culture of bureacracy.

Christina Larson is an award-winning foreign correspondent and science journalist based in Beijing, and a former Foreign Policy editor. She has reported from nearly a dozen countries in Asia. Her features have appeared in the New York Times, Wired, Science, Scientific American, the Atlantic, and other publications. In 2016, she won the Overseas Press Club of America’s Morton Frank Award for international magazine writing. Twitter: @larsonchristina

Tag: Environment