where’s the fire?

Hallelujah! The new year is not even a day old and the New York Times notes some good news: that “a middle stance” has emerged in one of the hottest partisan debates going: climate change.

The discourse over the issue has been feverish since Hurricane Katrina. Seizing the moment, many environmental campaigners, former Vice President Al Gore and some scientists have portrayed the growing human influence on the climate as an unfolding disaster that is already measurably strengthening hurricanes, spreading diseases and amplifying recent droughts and deluges.

Conservative politicians and a few scientists, many with ties to energy companies, have variously countered that human-driven warming is inconsequential, unproved or a manufactured crisis.

A third stance is now emerging, espoused by many experts who challenge both poles of the debate.

These “nonskeptical heretics,” as they’re called by Roger A. Pielke Jr., a political scientist and blogger,

agree that accumulating carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping smokestack and tailpipe gases probably pose a momentous environmental challenge, but say the appropriate response is more akin to buying fire insurance and installing sprinklers and new wiring in an old, irreplaceable house (the home planet) than to fighting a fire already raging.

“Climate change presents a very real risk,” said Carl Wunsch, a climate and oceans expert at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “It seems worth a very large premium to insure ourselves against the most catastrophic scenarios.” …

“A lot of people have independently come to the same sort of conclusion,” Dr. Pielke said. “We do have a problem, we do need to act, but what actions are practical and pragmatic?”

Mike Hulme, the director of the Tyndall Center for Climate Change Research in Britain, is quoted with an observation that got me thinking [emphasis added]:

“I have found myself increasingly chastised by climate change campaigners when my public statements and lectures on climate change have not satisfied their thirst for environmental drama,” he wrote. “I believe climate change is real, must be faced and action taken. But the discourse of catastrophe is in danger of tipping society onto a negative, depressive and reactionary trajectory.”

As I noted in “No One Likes a Cassandra,” which I wrote the last time the Times carried a common-sensical piece about the global-warming debate, extreme partisanship does a disservice to your cause, whatever it is. Attempting to impose urgency on people is not effective; in fact, it seems that the blowback from it (denial) may be worse than the inertia that causes people to ignore problems that aren’t obviously imminent and threatening.

So I salute all those who seek a Third Way (including the New York Times in this case for calling out the highly partisan Al Gore, who has politicized global warming to no one’s advantage—including his own) to break the many log-jams that stand in the way of our managing the many, many very challenging problems we face in 2007 and beyond.