Nicholas Goldberg: Americans don’t care about climate change. Here’s how to wake them up.
It was about four in the morning on May 23 when my phone rang.
“Good morning, Nicholas, this is John Gaventa from the New York Times calling for an interview and you will be on ‘The Daily Show’ in less than an hour.
“The interview will be on the show on Wednesday night. There was a very good article today about climate change and I thought you would be interested in it.”
My eyes were already on the TV, wondering how I would manage the interview with my young children in the room.
It also turned out that the show was on late. That meant that my interview with the editor-in-chief of ABC News, Charlie Rose, wouldn’t happen till the early morning of June 2.
I could have called and cancelled, leaving them without a replacement host, but I had already made a commitment to my young children. So, when I saw the Times article about the dangers of global warming on my computer screen, I went with it. The article discussed the growing concern over the dangers of climate change, citing the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change as an authority on the subject.
I was particularly interested in the second sentence of the piece: “A new study has found links between changes in temperature on Earth and the rise in numbers of people who live in cities.”
The study that the report was citing, published in a recent issue of Science, was conducted by Dr. William D. Nordhaus, a professor at Pennsylvania State University. He was the lead author of a paper that was published in Nature in 2004, in which he and his team measured the effects of climate change on temperature.
The report found that the temperature of the planet is on the rise, and that the increase in heat is linked to the increase in population.
“Our study shows with unprecedented precision the net effect of global warming on world temperatures,” he says. “We have shown that, on the average, warmer temperatures on the planet mean more people will live in cities. In fact, we find that the temperature rises have been sufficient to offset losses due to global warming of other kinds, such as sea-level rise.”
Dr. Nordhaus’s findings have been replicated by other scientists. A study published in Science magazine this month, which also examined the relationship between changes in temperature and population,