As you may have guessed, this posting is political (or environmental, if the two can be seen as separate anymore). Obviously, for those not interested, you can just skip this one and wait for my next entry, which should be more personal in nature. I should have it ready any time now…
It’s hot outside. You have no climate science training. It’s hot because of:
a) Global Warming
b) Regional Warming
c) Ozone Depletion
d) Global Cooling
e) Backside of Mini Ice Age
f) Climate Change
g) Al Gore is talking again
h) 500-pound bomb dropped on reclusive neighbor
i) Summer
If you answered anything other than “i”, but especially if you answered “a-f” ABC News would like to hear from you. You see, your daily observations of the weather are now legitimate Global Warming evidence! Don’t worry if you answered “b”, “d” or “e”; those emails will be carefully noted and tossed into the garbage. Isn’t it wonderful how a “legitimate news organization” can lend immediate credibility to any unproven theory that helps them keep their audience from switching to “So You Think You Can Dance”?
I know, I know. Even if there isn’t consensus from scientists, even if some ice sheets in Antarctica and Greenland are increasing and deepening as others shrink, even if Kyoto wouldn’t make a lick of difference, even if there is no way of proving that anything we’re doing is having any affect on the global climate: The “Climate Change” awareness movement still serves a purpose. It helps us to change our perceptions about our role in the world. It shows us that humanity is the scourge of the earth, and that it must be stopped.
Just read Ishmael (Matt, you knew this was coming…). Even if we’re a successful species now, our continued progress is like calling a cardboard box falling over a cliff “an airplane in flight”. It’s bound to crash when we can’t feed our exploding numbers anymore. Our sending of food and aid overseas just encourages poor people to keep spreading over a land that can’t support them.
The solution: let them die off until their numbers are small enough to be sustained by the natural resources in their immediate area. Hey, tough but fair, right? What’s the alternative?
Well, gee, I suppose, um, an alternative could be to help them…find ways to feed themselves?? Get education, reform corrupt governments, Engage in the economy, generate wealth, improve and refine farming techniques, become a part of free civilization? Any of these sound more appealing than the elite and enlightened holing up and letting the poor, faceless masses starve to death?
Developed countries occupy less space, produce more food than they can eat on less land than they ever have, clean up the air and water, and don't need to cut down forests the way they once did to generate energy. Rather than being the biggest drain, free, capitalist economies have been the greatest boon to their environments.
Global warming hysteria is based largely on speculative computer modeling, selective measurements of local weather changes, and general dismay that the earth won't stay exactly as it was when we remember it most fondly. We're only told the ominous predictions because they serve to deminish humanity more than saying "we don't know all the forces that cause climate change and can't determine what impact our activities are having, good or bad".
I felt that ABC's request required a response.
June 22, 2006
TO: ABC News
RE: Global Warming Affecting Your Life?
To solicit stories of the effects of global warming on daily life from the general public shows a reprehensible disregard for science and common sense. Most people have no scientific knowledge regarding even local climates before their lifetimes, and only conjectural awareness of general weather conditions during their parents’ and grandparents’ lives. This is akin to asking a butterfly, with a year-long lifespan, to speculate on the future of the earth as the first snowflakes fall. Knowing that most Americans derive their perceptions of the global climate from the media (who provide little to no forum for those actual scientists whose actual field of study is the earth’s climate and who have reached conclusions that differ with those of failed presidential candidates with no scientific training and a “documentary” to promote), what is really being asked for are examples from individuals on how well they’ve absorbed climate change hysteria and projected it onto their own lives. This is yet another instance of news organizations creating the story to generate an emotional response rather than reporting on actual facts or events. To keep the public misinformed about science’s lack of knowledge regarding climate change and humanity’s impact (or lack thereof) on it shows, at best, a propensity for ratings groveling through shameless sensationalism. At worst it reveals a complicity with the international movement (though perhaps above no more than “useful idiot” status) of “environmental” organizations whose goal is to decimate the economies of the worlds most stable and prosperous countries, through utterly misguided measures such as the Kyoto Protocol, for the heinous crime of improving the lives of that earthly virus known as humanity.
June 22, 2006 at 9:19 pm
Well…as an earth science teacher you have been correct in defining weather (day to day temp, precip, and changes in atmospheric pressure) is different from climate (historical e.g., 100+ years or more of weather trends) Has the earth’s avg. temp fluctuated by natural causes over time, yes. See the ice ages and warmings that have happened over history. [very good data for this one]
You are right, it is warm out because the earth is tilted 23.5 degrees toward the sun right now, even though it is 3 million miles further from it currently.
But, what we are faced with now is the question of if 150 years of our fossil-fuel derived industrial revolution, factories, energy, and transportation charging the amount of greenhouse gasses present in our atmosphere, will that ultimately have adverse affects. What we don’t know is that over time (meaning in climate terms) what that will eventually do(climate models are the best guess, and are getting better all the time), and what the effects of having two of the world’s most densely populated/prolific countries (China & India) will do to “catch up” on all the “lifestyle” things that our country has enjoyed over the last 75 years.
Regardless of whether (or is it weather) or not you believe that it is our fossil-fuel based economy is responsible for climate change, what does it really hurt to move away from this source of energy? What harm doe having more fuel efficient cars do? What harm will it be that the house we’re building is using geothermal,high-efficiency wood stoves, and passive solar do?
I love that you bring out these topics, it makes me think and come up with my beliefs in a more salient fashion.
While it is a bit dated now, What’s up with the Weather is a good primer on the current pro/con points on this issue.
And, no, I haven’t seen Gore’s new flick, yet.
Keep ‘em coming!
June 23, 2006 at 2:51 pm
I can’t tell you how humbling it is to have an actual expert commenting on my fevered ramblings. I’m the luckiest boy in the world!
The thing that relieves my worry about developing populations and their industrial growing pains is that they will not have to “rediscover” a number of industrial processes that took us 100 years to develop. An example is that remote African populations have gone directly to cell phone communication rather than having to build a land-line infrastructure. The more that these populations can benefit from our innovations, the cleaner and shorter their buildup is bound to be. What worries me more are the ultimate intentions of despotic governments, such as China, and what they might do with this cheap and efficient technology to further their ends.
Regarding our own industrial revolution, my doubts about our direct impact on climate change stem from the global cooling that took place between the 1940s and the 1970s when we were producing the most greenhouse gasses. Since then we’ve gotten more efficient and cleaner, and things heated up until 1998, when they started cooling again. I’ll send you a couple of great articles. These seem like farily inconclusive findings to start implementing what some organizations are suggesting in the way of curbing our energy consumption and production, which directly affects global economies.
All that being said, I am fully in favor of reducing our dependence on fossil fuels and becoming more efficient in general. I think any business that uses and produces energy strives for this automatically. It’s when the costs of these measures, decided not by the market but by governments, become so prohibitively/punatively high that those poorer countries which rely on the old methods, for now, are devestated economically.
Okay, this is getting to be post-length, so I’ll stop. But you’re the best, and I’ll be over at your blog shortly!!
August 10, 2007 at 2:46 pm
[...] are political points to be won, by Senator Boxer, the AP, and ABC news, for whom this is not the first instance of “advocacy journalism” in the service of the environmental [...]