According to Toles, maybe not:
Much as I dislike giving credit to a fake enviro like Thomas Friedman for writing about the environment, his column yesterday effectively made some important points no other nationally syndicated columnist has dared put forth, at least that I know of. The column is called Mother Nature's Dow:
feeling. But if you follow climate science, what has been striking is
how insistently some of the world’s best scientists have been warning —
in just the past few months — that climate change is happening faster
and will bring bigger changes quicker than we anticipated just a few
years ago. Indeed, if Mother Nature had a Dow, you could say that it,
too, has been breaking into new (scientific) lows.
Consider just two recent articles:
The
Washington Post reported on Feb. 1, that “the pace of global warming is
likely to be much faster than recent predictions, because industrial
greenhouse gas emissions have increased more quickly than expected and
higher temperatures are triggering self-reinforcing feedback mechanisms
in global ecosystems, scientists said. ‘We are basically looking now at
a future climate that’s beyond anything we’ve considered seriously in
climate model simulations,’ Christopher Field, director of the Carnegie
Institution’s Department of Global Ecology at Stanford University,
said.”
The physicist and climate expert Joe Romm recently noted on his blog, climateprogress.org,
that in January, M.I.T.’s Joint Program on the Science and Policy of
Global Change quietly updated its Integrated Global System Model that
tracks and predicts climate change from 1861 to 2100. Its revised
projection indicates that if we stick with business as usual, in terms
of carbon-dioxide emissions, average surface temperatures on Earth by
2100 will hit levels far beyond anything humans have ever experienced.
our more recent global model simulations,” explained M.I.T., “the ocean
heat-uptake is slower than previously estimated, the ocean uptake of
carbon is weaker, feedbacks from the land system as temperature rises
are stronger, cumulative emissions of greenhouse gases over the century
are higher, and offsetting cooling from aerosol emissions is lower. Not
one of these effects is very strong on its own, and even adding each
separately together would not fully explain the higher temperatures.
[But,] rather than interacting additively, these different effects
appear to interact multiplicatively, with feedbacks among the
contributing factors, leading to the surprisingly large increase in the
chance of much higher temperatures.”
Mike, my faithful reader, I know Friedman is a jet-setter with a carbon footprint probably about the size of New Jersey, and he's come to this subject having blown his credibility on Iraq, the economy, and countless less important topics. But still — this time he's right.
Kit Stolz 
You’re such a kind soul, Kit. I’m not.
You’re right about Friedman being an influential voice, and better late than never on this subject. Unfortunately, as you’ve taught me with your insistently beautiful but depressing blog, it’s probably way too late. Margaret Atwood and Doris Lessing, the two old Cassandras of our time, are probably closer to the truth of what we’re facing than Friedman, and he’s not going to fix it with a snappy Times op-ed. Still, it doesn’t hurt.
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Sorry Steve! Believe me, I appreciate all my readers, those who comment and those who don’t…
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