Is human activity causing the world to warm up?
I dunno.
Almost every scientist worthy of the name says so, but I'm used to taking the long view, and in the long view the earth heats up and it cools down; it heats up and it cools down. Are scientists playing Henny Penny?
But also in the long view, the scientific method – though it's only been around for a few centuries – looks like a pretty good way to find out what's going on. Looking at human history in the long view, we wasted quite a few millennia blaming things we didn't understand on the evil eye. Or God.
Using this relatively new method of looking at the world, we observe things and describe what we think is happening based on those observations. Then we observe some more, and measure some more, and that description either stands or falls based on evidence, not on what we wish were true.
This has worked pretty well for us. We had a lot more success treating smallpox as a disease caused by a virus, than by blaming it on sin. [Sin tried to make a come-back as an explanation for AIDS, but just didn't have the staying power it had in centuries gone by.]
Right now the evidence that's been gathered makes a strong case that human activity is causing the Earth to heat up. And projecting the charts and graphs over the next century, things look catastrophically bleak if we don't do something about that. Can this be true?
I dunno. Maybe not. But that's how the evidence is understood right now, and if we're understanding it correctly, we're in big trouble. With so much at stake, any rational person will have more confidence in scientific evidence than in Congressional gasbags. Paul Krugman spelled it out in his column today:
... [S]ometimes even the most authoritative analyses get things wrong. And if dissenting opinion-makers and politicians based their dissent on hard work and hard thinking — if they had carefully studied the issue, consulted with experts and concluded that the overwhelming scientific consensus was misguided — they could at least claim to be acting responsibly.Legislation to address climate change barely passed in the House. Things are not looking good in the Senate. Where do your Senators stand? (Or, in the case of Minnesota, your Senator.)
But if you watched the debate [in the House of Representatives] on Friday, you didn’t see people who’ve thought hard about a crucial issue, and are trying to do the right thing. What you saw, instead, were people who show no sign of being interested in the truth. They don’t like the political and policy implications of climate change, so they’ve decided not to believe in it — and they’ll grab any argument, no matter how disreputable, that feeds their denial.
Indeed, if there was a defining moment in Friday’s debate, it was the declaration by Representative Paul Broun of Georgia that climate change is nothing but a “hoax” that has been “perpetrated out of the scientific community.” I’d call this a crazy conspiracy theory, but doing so would actually be unfair to crazy conspiracy theorists. After all, to believe that global warming is a hoax you have to believe in a vast cabal consisting of thousands of scientists — a cabal so powerful that it has managed to create false records on everything from global temperatures to Arctic sea ice.
Yet Mr. Broun’s declaration was met with applause.
2 comments:
Oh, its a tough issue. Nobody wants to have to change the way they live or do business. And, Iowa farmers want to keep growing corn for ethanol. What are the senators to do?
Jeannelle,
Thanks for the good comment and the link. After that article was written, a compromise on ethanol was reached. According to the Wall Street Journal:
Mr. Waxman has agreed to language preventing the Environmental Protection Agency from calculating “indirect” greenhouse gas emissions that result when farmers plant a lot of corn in marginal land in order to make more ethanol. The push to take an unemotional look at whether the entire process of producing ethanol – and biofuels generally – helps slow global warming or contributes to it has been killed. More on the backstory of this so-called lifecycle analysis here.
But, does this omission make a whit of difference? Not really, says Joe Romm at Climate Progress: “I just don’t see how this deal changes any of the major outcomes of the bill much, if at all.”
He points out that the die was cast for ethanol back in the 2007 Energy Bill when a deal was struck to mandate the use of 15 billion gallons of corn ethanol in the nation’s fuel supply – “with a full exemption from lifecycle analysis.” In exchange, the corn advocates allowed in a 22 billion gallon mandate for cellulosic ethanol made from switchgrass and other non-edible plants. Of course, none of this saved most ethanol makers from heading into bankruptcy court over the past nine months after getting eviscerated by falling gasoline prices and rising corn prices or have helped create a scalable cellulosic ethanol technology.
Now, I'll admit I don't understand half of that, but the gist seems to be that the particular issue of concern cited by the Iowa Senators was resolved in their favor.
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