It’s Gettin’ Hot in Here. So What?
One opinion on global warming
After my girl Cindy and I had our quasi-scientific conversation about global warming, she thought I should let it all hang out here in the web log. Good place to vent, she says. Yeah, and maybe she’s right.
Well to start you ought to know that I’ve heard the scientific stuff and accepted it. 2,500 scientists got together and agreed that the earth IS getting hotter and they’re pretty sure we humans are the cause. The average temperature around the planet is going to go up at least 3 and maybe as much as 7 degrees by the turn of the next century, a short 93 years from now. And sea levels will rise by 23 inches. Or maybe, the same group says, only by seven inches. This they equate with the coming of Armageddon, or the end days in Revelations. I get it. And I suppose it’s probably real.
Of course, I have a detective’s natural skepticism of their evidence. We’ve got maybe a century worth of hard data. The planet, as I understand it, is six BILLION years old, and tends to work in very long cycles. And it seems like in the 60s and 70s the scientists were just as certain that the earth was cooling off.
Also, can we check our egos, people? Personally, I think it’s pretty damned arrogant for us to assume that we’re actually changing planetary conditions. And maybe it’s even MORE arrogant for us to think we can change it on purpose and fix this “problem.”
But here’s the thing. Suppose the scary scientists are right. I sure won’t live to see it. If I had kids, they probably wouldn’t either. But after I’m gone the ocean will rise up and bury us. Well, let’ see… 23 inches… 93 years… I think that’s like a quarter inch per year. And that’s the worst estimate. Are we really scared that we can’t adapt to this? Build all our stuff a little farther from shore, or build dikes a little higher? Or how about digging a couple channels and letting those extra inches of water flow in and irrigate some of our existing dessert land and making arable so more folks can eat? Why must everything be a calamity?
The truth is we got way too much ignorance, hatred, poverty, crime, and terrorism going on right now, not to mention pestilence, war, famine and death. Yep, the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse have already arrived and “warmth” ain’t one of them. So how about we focus on the crap we need to fix here and now, instead of sweating what might happen a couple of generations down the road?
posted by Austin S. Camacho at 8:13 AM
7 Comments:
Hannibal, if you really think the scary predictors might be right, then it follows that what we're now might decide how it will go over the coming century. That's the point. Ask for absolute proof, or unanimous consensus, and you won't get it. But how about compelling evidence and significant scientific agreement? What they're screaming is that what we're doing now will affect, perhaps permanently, whether the earth will continue to tolerate its obnoxious human virus. Is it arrogant and grandiose to note that some of that ice that's melting now, and melting fast, has been frozen for the past half-million years? It's one thing to take up the subject, look at all the evidence and join the skeptics. But Hannibal, it sounds like you're basing your own skepticism on the fact that it sounds so huge it must therefore be preposterous. Sure, build further from the coast. But what about Africa and Asia drying up and their populations having to migrate? Is it really arrogance to do what's humanly possible to reduce greenhouse gases, just in case? Do we lose anything in the attempt, and aren't there enough collateral benefits to be worth the exercise?
Joan (who will eventually post under an account, but couldn't sign up for one without navigating off the page)
Speaking for Hannibal Jones,
Hiya, Joan,
Okay, here’s where part company. I’m hearing the significant scientific agreement on the global warming question. What I’m NOT hearing, is the science that says “what we're doing now will affect, perhaps permanently, whether the earth will continue to tolerate its obnoxious human virus.” Yeah, something’s causing this warming trend. Just as this ol’ earth has had long warming and cooling trends before. But all the evidence I’ve heard seems to indicate that she corrects the balance after a while, either way. You know, back in the 60s and 70s my dad had protesters screaming at him that by the turn of the century we’d all be crispy critters because we were destroying the ozone layer and it was all the protection we had against the sun. Should humans take credit for fixing that? Or should we just admit that we made some small improvements but overall Mother Earth is a hell of a lot tougher than those protesters gave her credit for being?
I’m not saying that it looks like such a big problem it can’t be true. I’m just saying that a big change doesn’t always look like a big problem to me. 200 years ago there were river in some places that are desserts now. That’s a big-ass change, kiddo, but it didn’t destroy life, just changed it in places. Who know? Maybe this old world NEEDS more water and less ice.
And I’m also not saying there’s anything wrong with doing what we can. I’d love to have an electric car instead of the gas guzzler I drive, and we DO have the technology. I’m down with solar panels, low energy bulbs or whatever’s green. I’m just not about going into a panic about world changes. It’s like, I don’t exactly know what killed all the dinosaurs, but I suspect that if it didn’t happen, you and I wouldn’t be here having this debate.
Hannibal's pretty smart, but he doesn't know much about systems. It's not just about a little extra rain, it's about interlocking changes on a complex system that has been pretty good about buffering the hard knocks for awhile now, but just might be reaching its limits. If the Greenland ice sheet does start to melt and slide off, it's not going to send a polite invitation letter and give us twenty years to figure out what to do at that point. No, it's going to dump a gazillion gallons of cold fresh water on top of a salt-water conveyor belt, which could very likely just *stop* the entire ocean conveyor system. And then, a couple years after that, when southern Europe is getting snowed under some brand new glaciers, I want Hannibal and all the other skeptics to raise their hands and say, "Yup, that was us. We didn't think it was gonna happen." Not that it'll do much good at that point. I just don't understand people who wouldn't red-line a fast car 'cause it might blow a valve and seize up, but who don't worry a hair about red-lining a whole planet.
Oh, and the reason that the ozone hole is getting larger at a slower rate now, and might be expected to eventually get smaller again is because people and their governments around the world completely banned the use of previously wide-spread popular chemicals that were catalyzing the reaction of 03 to 02. Stratospheric aerosols take a long long time to settle out, but now, some decades after we stopped dumping them into the atmosphere, settling out is exactly what they are slowly doing. All that screaming about crispy critters got people to do the right thing, eventually. That doesn't prove the "screamers" were wrong.
The Earth is indeed resilliant, but that doesn't mean invulnerable. Take a walk around the Aral Sea to see what humans can do to a large swath of the Earth in a very short amount of time.
Hannibal -- About the dinosaurs: As the young people would say, WORD. Like yourself, I am absolutely grateful for whatever made them step aside so we could evolve. Maybe because of a meteor blocking their sunlight and killing off their food sources, or maybe they just ate everything in sight, and finally one another, because they couldn't adapt to the point of learning to farm and ranch. The image of which makes me smile, as if they were just starting to get the hang of it when the lights went out. Perhaps cockroach archaeologists will study our skulls and artifacts and publish volumes about our tiny brains and our inability to adapt our appetites to our resources.
About the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse: Fire, Famine, Pestilence and War. It's not an argument I'm going to try to make here, but it sure is easy to envision each of those conditions directly resulting from climate change.
Like yourself, I'm all for doing what we can, and not for panicking. But the screaming, oh that's fun.
Replying for Hannibal Jones:
Any relation to Dr. Woo? Are you really just a shadow of the man that I once knew?
Hey, I don’t claim to be a systems expert. I just know what I've read, and nothing I've seen so far, even in worst-case scenarios, indicates that the warming effect will hit us rather more gradually than you expect. And like I said before, I'm not so sure the change will be a world wide disaster. Double snow in Southern Europe? Yeah, an inconvenience, but double fresh water on Africa? Not so bad. If the engine blows in your car it could kill you NOW, not 100 years later.
The real point of my original remarks is that we got enough stuff to worry about that ISN'T 3 generations down the road. How about focusing some of that energy and angst on the aids epidemic that's emptying African countries NOW? Or the hundreds of thousands who are going without an education TODAY - the kids who might grow up to find a real solution to climate shift you're so worried about if we give them a chance. What I can't is understand people who won't make noise and work hard to save the humans who are living right now because they're so worried that the earth will perish in three generations because of changes that have been happening for millions of years off and on.
Replying for Hannibal Jones:
Any relation to Dr. Woo? Are you really just a shadow of the man that I once knew?
Hey, I don't claim to be a systems expert. I just know what I've read, and nothing I've seen so far, even in worst-case scenarios, indicates that the warming effect will hit us rather more gradually than you expect. And like I said before, I'm not so sure the change will be a world wide disaster. Double snow in Southern Europe? Yeah, an inconvenience, but double fresh water on Africa? Not so bad. If the engine blows in your car it could kill you NOW, not 100 years later.
The real point of my original remarks is that we got enough stuff to worry about that ISN'T 3 generations down the road. How about focusing some of that energy and angst on the aids epidemic that's emptying African countries NOW? Or the hundreds of thousands who are going without an education TODAY - the kids who might grow up to find a real solution to climate shift you're so worried about if we give them a chance.
I just don't understand people who won't make noise and work hard to save the humans who are living right now because they’re so worried that the earth will perish in three generations because of changes that have been happening for millions of years off and on.
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