Global warming deniers come in basically one version: the one which holds their hands to their ears and sings lalalalalalala all day, refusing to discuss any and all evidence of global warming or that fossil fuels have anything to do with it.
They are more willing to believe the craziest conspiracy theories and outright lies rather than deal with facts. It’s a shame really, because the facts are there and they are telling us something needs to be done — Now. Not twenty or thirty of fifty or one hundred years in the future, but right fricking now! Like this information, for one:
Channels through the Canadian Arctic archipelago that were choked with ice at this time of year two decades ago are now expanses of open water or vast patchworks of tiny islands of melting ice.
In 1994, the “Louie,” as the crew calls the ship, and a United States Coast Guard icebreaker, the Polar Sea, smashed their way to the North Pole through thousands of miles of pack ice six- to nine-feet thick. “The sea conditions in the Arctic Ocean were rarely an issue for us in those days, because the thick continuous ice kept waves from forming,” Marc Rothwell, the Louie’s captain, told me. “Now, there’s so much open water that we have to account for heavy swells that undulate through the sea ice. It’s almost like a dream: the swells move in slow motion, like nothing I’ve seen elsewhere.”
The Arctic is warming twice as fast as the rest of the planet, and this summer its sea ice is melting at a near-record pace. The sun is heating the newly open water, so it will take longer to refreeze this winter, and the resulting thinner ice will melt more easily next summer.
Sixtteen years ago the arctic ice pack was 6 to 9 feet thick? Hard to imagine it’s gone away so quickly. But it has. Has the sun suddenly gotten so much hotter that we on earth are baking in a overheated solar oven? No. Not at all. In fact, the sun is in a cooling phase at the moment, or things would probably be worse.
So, despite a cooling sun, we’ve just experienced the hottest decade in reported history, and 2010 is on pace to be the hottest year in recorded history. The first 7 months of this year have already been the hottest ever recorded.
All the predictions that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predicted are occurring, just sooner than anyone expected: Severe drought, massive storms, both in winter and Summer triggering record floods in North America (Nashville anyone?), China and most horrifically in Pakistan, with thousands dead and millions homeless and at risk of disease from unsanitary conditions, unclean drinking water and a lack of food and medical supplies
Record heat waves in the Northeast United States and Russia. Indeed, the Russian heat wave triggered massive wild fires so extensive that the Russian Government banned wheat exports because so much crop land (500,000 acres) and nearly one third of Russia’s grain crop has turned to cinders and ash.
Yet despite the clear and convincing evidence that human activity is the primary driver of global climate change …
Physicist Pablo F. Verdes of the Heidelberg Academy of Sciences in Germany has found a way to avoid the subjective flaws of climate models by applying sophisticated analysis techniques to data from the past hundred and fifty years.
The approach mathematically stitches together known facts about the global climate into a more objective and coherent picture.
Verdes, now at Novartis Pharma, examined data on temperature anomalies, the strength of the radiation emitted from the Sun, and volcanic activity. The relatively recent increases in solar radiation, combined with reduced volcanic activity, contribute to the increase in world temperatures. However, Verdes’ analysis demonstrates that these natural causes do not completely explain the observed warming.
Verdes calculated the amount of non-natural influence required to match the increases in temperature observed in the last 150 years. He plotted the influence over time. Then, he compared it to the evolution of greenhouse gasses, taking into account the cooling due to aerosols. With allowances for error, he found that influences attributable to greenhouse gasses mirror the graph of non-natural influence needed to explain the observed temperature increase of recent decades.
His research shows that, if you look at global warming as a puzzle, and you put together the natural factors such as increased solar radiation and reduced volcanic activity, a hole remains. The human factors of greenhouse gas and aerosol emission complete the picture.
… many still cling to the false belief that human beings have nothing to do with what we can all see happening with our own eyes: earlier springs, later winters, more severe storms, record temperatures, animal and plant extinction, the acidification of the Oceans to name but a few.
Yet our politicians do nothing. Our news media reports the issue as if the climate scientists and the climate change deniers (who predominantly are not experts in climate science) have equally valid points of view. Why is this so? Here’s one answer:
Many factors have conspired to produce this situation. Human beings are notoriously poor at responding to problems that develop incrementally. And most of us aren’t eager to change our lifestyles by sharply reducing our energy consumption.
But social scientists have identified another major reason: Climate change has become an ideologically polarizing issue. It taps into deep personal identities and causes what Dan Kahan of Yale calls “protective cognition” — we judge things in part on whether we see ourselves as rugged individualists mastering nature or as members of interconnected societies who live in harmony with the environment. Powerful special interests like the coal and oil industries have learned how to halt movement on climate policy by exploiting the fear people feel when their identities are threatened.
The myth that we are the masters of our fate is at the heart of the political polarization on this issue in the United States, an issue that should, under any rational analysis, not be a matter for political debate. Those who see themselves as in control of their destiny simply will not accept that a global, communal, worldwide effort is necessary to combat the causes of climate change and ameliorate the future consequences.
They live with the false fantasy that individuals determine the future course of events, not the collective actions of billions of people. It may be a very useful strategy to maintain optimism and hope for one’s personal future, but it is precisely the wrong mindset to follow when dealing with problems of a truly global scope.
It was the same mindset that led major financial institutions to create and sell mortgage backed securities and other mortgage based derivatives on the assumption that the housing market would continue to rise and that they, the Lords of Wall Street could do no wrong, because they controlled the levers of power. Unfortunately those rugged individualists on Wall Street were utterly and completely wrong, and like the global climate deniers today, they rejected any evidence that did not square with their own personal beliefs about the “market.”
It is a mindset which leads to inaction and a refusal to acknowledge that we need to help one another and act collectively if we wish to prevent worse disruptions to our climate, our coastal areas, our economies, and even our food supply:
[E]xperts are especially concerned that new patterns of air movement in the Arctic could disrupt the Northern Hemisphere’s jet streams — which are apparently weakening and moving northward. This could alter storm tracks, rainfall patterns and food production far to the south.
The limited slack in the world’s food system, particularly its grain production, can amplify the effects of disruptions. Remember that two years ago, when higher oil prices encouraged farmers to shift enormous tracts of cropland from grain to biofuel production, grain prices quickly doubled or tripled. Violence erupted in dozens of countries. Should climate change cause crop failures in major food-producing regions of Europe, North America and East Asia, the consequences would likely be far more severe.
In short, the longer we continue this political “gridlock” which benefits no one but the fossil fuel industries and those dependent upon them, the sooner we will face massive social disruptions, not just a Winter and Summer of strange weather events.
Otherwise these following projections are very real future scenarios we may be forced to contend with:
In the most likely scenarios, climate change would cause some kind of regional or continental disruption, like a major crop failure; this disruption would cascade through the world’s tightly connected economic and political systems to produce a global effect. Severe floods dislocating millions of people in a key poor country — as we’re seeing right now in Pakistan — could allow radicals to seize power and tip a geopolitically vital region into war. Or drought could cause an economically critical region like the North China plain to exhaust its water reserves, forcing people to leave en masse and precipitating a crisis that reverberates through the world economy.
A climate shock in North America is easy to imagine. Say a prolonged drought causes major cities in the American Southeast or Southwest to run out of water; both regions have large urban populations pushing against upper limits of water supply. The news clips of cars streaming out of Atlanta or Phoenix might finally push our leaders to do something serious about climate change.
Yet we wait. We wait for these disasters because we are afraid. Afraid to be called alarmists. Afraid we might have to adopt to a less cushy lifestyle. Afraid we may need to cooperate with other nations rather than bending them to our will.
Believe me, I am as worried about terrorists as the next person, but the greatest national security threat to our nation and to every other nation on the planet earth of global climate change. We have gotten only a a taste this year of what may come. Already the severe weather events that have occurred have had major effects on international politics, commodity markets and the stability of various regions. Not to mention that millions of people have died or been made homeless or lost their livelihoods as a result of these “natural” disasters.
If the Pentagon, the CIA and Insurance companies take global warming seriously and are developing plans as I type these very words to deal with the potential disasters they envision, why aren’t our politicians acting? Well you know the answer to that.
We can’t change the current situation overnight, despite the evidence of real and looming disasters, but we can vote for candidates who support taking action and not waiting for the other shoe to drop. Educate yourself about your candidates and their views and make sure that they know you consider that this “problem” is critical to your vote.
Because if it isn’t, it should be. The GOP has primarily sold their souls to Big Oil. Make sure your Democratic candidates know that you expect better from them.
