While the United States is still home to an untold number of Climate Change deniers and skeptics, the president of the World Bank is convinced.
A draft working group report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change due Sept. 27 will reinforce the case for urgent action to address global warming, World Bank President Jim Yong Kim said Sept. 23.
Kim was among several speakers at the opening session of the annual Climate Week NYC event in New York City suggesting that the IPCC draft should put to rest the scientific questions about the role of human activity and present a challenge to action.
Climate skeptics have a problem with science, said Kim, who was trained as a physician. “We have to stop these silly arguments and move forward with what we are going to do.”
It’s significant that the president of the World Bank is convinced because the World Bank is who developing nations will turn to when the consequences of climate change take their toll.
Kim is not alone in saying we have to “stop these silly arguments.”
Popular Science, which has been in business for over 141 years, decided to permanently shutter its comment section this week because science-denying concern trolls have turned it into a cesspool.
That is not to suggest that we are the only website in the world that attracts vexing commenters. Far from it. Nor is it to suggest that all, or even close to all, of our commenters are shrill, boorish specimens of the lower internet phyla. We have many delightful, thought-provoking commenters.
But even a fractious minority wields enough power to skew a reader’s perception of a story, recent research suggests.
And what Popular Science did not enunciate but I will is the fact that a number of trolls are actually paid flacks hired by oil companies, think-tanks, and political campaigns that deliberately mislead people.
That is not to imply that all or a majority of them are, but paid trolls do exist.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report will be released on Friday of this week.