Yes, Greenland´s Ice is melting. But...

It is not often that I find common ground with one of the most conservative writers I know.  But, Bret Stephens had an epiphany of sorts. It required a trip to Greenland and conversations with a world class oceanographer and an expert on risk management.  Still, while he was convinced that there is a problem, he stops short of buying into drastic action plans to do anything about it.

Stephens admits:

"For years, I saw myself not as a global-warming denier (a loaded term with its tendentious echo of Holocaust denial) but rather as an agnostic on the causes of climate change and a scoffer at the idea that it was a catastrophic threat to the future of humanity.

Do you know anyone like that?

It’s not that I was unalterably opposed to the idea that, by pumping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, modern civilization was contributing to the warming by 1 degree Celsius and the inches of sea-level rise the planet had experienced since the dawn of the industrial age. It’s that the severity of the threat seemed to me wildly exaggerated and that the proposed cures all smacked of old-fashioned statism mixed with new-age religion."

 It required a trip to Greenland with John Englander, a highly regarded climatologist, to change his thinking.

"Greenland is about the size of Alaska and California combined and, except at its coasts, is covered by ice that in places is nearly two miles thick."

 Eventually he was convinced that:

"The data shows unmistakably that Greenland’s ice is not in balance. It is losing far more than it is gaining."

But that was not nearly enough for Mr. Stephens:

"Just as I had once scoffed at the idea of climate doom, I had also, for almost identical reasons, dismissed predictions of another catastrophic global pandemic on a par with the 1918-20 influenza outbreak. After all, hadn’t we pushed through previous alarms involving Ebola, SARS, MERS and vCJD (mad cow disease) without immense loss of life? Hadn’t virology, epidemiology, public hygiene, drug development and medicine all come a long way since the end of World War I, rendering comparisons with past pandemics mostly moot?"

"That’s what I thought until the spring of 2020, when, along with everyone else, I experienced how swiftly and implacably nature can overwhelm even the richest and most technologically advanced societies. It was a lesson in the sort of intellectual humility I recommended for others and began to realize I could use more of myself."

I think that was a rather strange route to take to get to that conclusion. Nevertheless, whatever it took, it got him closer to facing the facts.

He then consulted with a  risk expert of sorts, Seth Klarman, a hedge fund manager (of all people), who told him:

“I’ve talked to so many experts and seen so much evidence,” he told me over Zoom, “I’m convinced the climate is changing, and addressing climate change has become a philanthropic priority of mine.”

“If you face something that is potentially existential,” he explained, “existential for nations, even for life as we know it, even if you thought the risk is, say, 5 percent, you’d want to hedge against it.”

"How?"

“One thing we try to do,” he said, “is we buy protection when it’s really inexpensive, even when we think we may well not need it.” The forces contributing to climate change, he noted, echoing Englander, “might be irreversible sooner than the damage from climate change has become fully apparent. You can’t say it’s far off and wait when, if you had acted sooner, you might have dealt with it better and at less cost. We have to act now.”

"In other words, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure."

That concept has been around for many years.  But it finally penetrated Mr. Stephens´ consciousness.  Good for him. But Mr. Stephens´ epiphany ended at about that point.

He is extremely skeptical of a carbon tax to pay for action.  Really, any strong action makes him uncomfortable. We might make mistakes!

He says:

"As I’ve always believed, knowing there is grave risk to future generations — and expecting current ones to make immediate sacrifices for it — defies most of what we know about human nature."

He then goes on to describe the difficulty of the task. 

And he decries the polarization that the issue engenders. But he does come to at least one worthwhile conclusion: Thoughtful policies are needed. And he seems to contradict the point he made previously about current generations making sacrifices for those who come later:

A problem for the future is, by its very nature, a moral one. A conservative movement that claims to care about what we owe the future has the twin responsibility of setting an example for its children and at the same time preparing for that future. The same prudential logic that applies to personal finances, business decisions, Social Security, the federal debt or other risks to financial solvency should dictate thoughtful policies when it comes to climate.

I think (and I am not being sarcastic) Mr. Stephens provides useful insight into conservative thought in the US.

We should take that and run with it. It´s progress!