I am a skeptic who is also a big proponent of sustainable design and construction. I tend to be in the camp that feels that even if we're wrong about climate change, it just makes sense to reduce our impact on the environment anyway.

My main concern is the intrinsic levels of error that come with any model: economic, environmental, or otherwise. If you asked a group of leading economists even as little as six months ago about where we would be today I guarantee they would not have predicted the scale and magnitude of our current recession. I imagine if we look at all of the climate models 20 years from now they will be proven similarly innaccurate, hopefully in a way that is

Ultimately all climate models are based on assumptions. I feel it is impossible to for us to really understand how the world will react tomorrow, the next week, or twenty years from now. For a good example of all of the ways we've gotten it wrong over the years I highly recommend Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything, a fascinating read about how as a general rule, our predictions as a society about the way things work are typically incorrect.

I don't mean to belittle the efforts of climate scientists and other environmentalists working to better understand where we live. Most reports I've read clearly state the uncertainty inherent in the models, though media reports almost always downplay (or outright omit) their importance in favor of highlighting a more interesting headline.

At the end of the day I'm more scared about the climate scientist being right than them being wrong, and for that reason I'll support any reasonable project aimed at lessening our carbon footprint. Moving to nuclear energy from coal on what is largely a CO2 argument doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me given the relative expense, danger, and other environmental issues raised with nuclear generation. Wind power, solar, hydro, and geothermal however seem like excellent long term solutions we should be advocating for strongly, regardless of ones thoughts on global warming.

Though we are consuming enormous amounts of energy, materials, and land as a society, the earth is resilient in ways that are impossible to predict ("unknown unknowns" in the parlance of Donald's Rumsfeld). I will forever consider myself (and hopefully act in a manner consistent with being) a strong environmentalist, for reasons wholly unrelated to climate change. I fear climate change as well, but I think it will be nearly impossible for me to believe in it until I see the effects firsthand. As by then it may be too late, I hope that day never comes.

Joel McKellar
Real Life LEED