Wednesday, March 28, 2007

Climate Change Denial Gone Mad

I had the great pleasure to attend an Australia-Israel Chamber of Commerce lunch yesterday addressed by Michael Hawker, CEO of IAG on how climate change will affect business.

One person got up to ask a question and implied that people like Hawker were only on the climate change bandwagon because they had something to gain. She used the Y2K bug as an example of fear mongering and "nothing happened."

I took the time to see her afterwards - because this is a crock. All firms that I have any direct experience of did find in their extensive remediation programs instances of date coding that would have made systems unworkable on 1 Jan 2000. The preventative work is WHY nothing happened. So far be Y2K a reason for not acting on climate change, it is a reason for acting now.

As to the suggestion that we should be suspicious of self-interest - well that is a whole other issue that revolves in part around the meaning of "profit". That is for another day.

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