Question: Do we have to make sure that debates about science don’t give people an excuse to step away from talking about values and actually saying what they care about and what sort of future they want to create?
Answer: Ultimately, the choices that confront us are values choices. The question of avoiding dangerous climate change revolves around the word dangerous, and the word dangerous is fundamentally a values-laden word. It’s not a scientifically delineated term. We’ve been in this bollix since 1990. The negotiations leading to the Framework Conventional on Climate Change, never define the word dangerous because no one wants to touch it. The politicians know that it’s too dangerous for them to define it. They toss it off to the scientists and the scientists say that’s not our decision. We just tell you how much warming is going to happen, how much sea level will rise, and you figure out what level is unacceptable. So it goes round and round. Until society really gets a clearer sense of what this boils down to is a decision about what is our responsibility to the next generation and what is our responsibility to our neighbor. And in this case our neighbor could be Bangladesh on this little village called Earth. Until then we’re not really going to make progress on the issue.
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