A New Middle Stance Emerges in Debate over Climate - New York Times

Another good article by Mr. Revkin, I've posted an excerpt below.
Peter


A New Middle Stance Emerges in Debate over Climate - New York Times


“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?”
This approach was most publicly laid out in an opinion article on the BBC Web site in November by Mike Hulme, the director of the Tyndall Center for Climate Change Research in Britain.
Dr. Hulme said that shrill voices crying doom could paralyze instead of inspire.

“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.”

Other experts say there is no time for nuance, given the general lack of public response to the threat posed particularly by carbon dioxide, a byproduct of burning fossil fuels and forests that persists for a century or more in the air and is accumulating rapidly in the atmosphere and changing the pH of the oceans.