This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Tuesday, March 3rd, 2009. I'm Caleb Brown.

The climate change debate is certainly polarizing. So what about scientists who agree that climate change is real but also believe it's not the end of the world?

Where do they fit in? Cato Senior Fellow in Environmental Studies Pat Michaels explores those ideas in his new book

Climate of Extremes.

The discourse on climate change in fact has become a climate of extremes. Either it seems you think the world is coming to an

end from climate change and pronto, or you say there is no such thing as climate change.

It may be shocking that here in Washington issues get polarized like this,

but of course they all do.

Now it's gotten to the point that if you say well climate change is real but it's

not the end of the world both polls of the debate get angry with you.

The people who say it's the end of the world and the people who say that it's not real,

but in fact that is the truth.

Climate change is real, it's modest, it's proceeding at a rate that is below the statistical rates predicted by the climate

models. In other words, those models are in the process of failing and there's not very much you can do about it.

Examples of the climate of extremes are all over this book.

My favorite is the notion that all the ice is going to rapidly fall off of Greenland in the next

hundred years and sea levels going to rise 20 odd feet.

This is championed by one person and one person only.

NASA is James Hanson who is certainly the most extremist of all the

global warming scientists, and Al Gore likes to repeat it in somewhat modified

form.

Well, the fact of the matter is, for several millennia.

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