Global Warming
I'm telling myself I need to do some more positive posts on my little blog here. Maybe its time for me to write another good story from my past. My friends who blog have the advantage of all having families, so blogging gives them the chance to 1) blog about their children and the challenges of parenthood, always a good read for those of us in the same age group, 2) escape the same challenges and blog about what interests them in their paltry spare time. As for me, the bachelor with no family, it all seems rather narcissistic sometimes. Thus, I haven't been blogging as often recently as I was when it was new and fresh.
But I takes the world around me seriously, and that informs my opinions. Nevertheless, I'm going to make an effort to change some foci to my blogging. For example, the current administration has sunk so far, so fast, that to chronicle all their abuses has to seem like "bashing" or "piling on." Of course, it's not; it's reporting. And it all should be reported. Like today: Cheney continues to make millions off of other people's misery. First with Haliburton, now with Katrina. I think history is going to show that Cheney is the biggest profiteer of war since the "golden age." If his five Vietnam deferments weren't enough, he's made millions off our adventures in the Middle East since he was Secretary of Defense during Bush 41.
I'm sorry. I said I wasn't going to do that. But then you have to wonder about this week's news that when the entire (the ENTIRE) administration was trumpeting that they finally found the WMD on May 29, 2003 (remember the "mobile biological labs?" I didn't think so; no one remembers anything anymore apart from what Fox News tells them to), they had actually gotten CIA memos two days before that specifically detailed what they really were--weather balloon research stations. And yet the administration adamently stressed that they then knew, KNEW, that they had found the WMDs. Look it up: Bush is on record saying as much on the 29th. Great: the Bushies had officially gotten in touch with the logic of the Roswell UFO freaks.
Damn, I did it again. I can't help myself. So let me get to the point of this original blog: global warming. You see, almost every scientist worth his or her salt knows now that global warming is real and getting dangerously close to crossing a threshold of no return. And its not just "cyclical" as many right-wingers will tell you, its been unprecendently accelerated by humans. According to current models based on the retreat of the glaciers and arctic ice in the polar regions, it is now being predicted that the Arctic Ocean may be completely ice-free by 2050, or at the very least by the end of the century. Now, this doesn't seem much to us, but I'll tell you, if we were Canada, and we had a significant population that depended on the polar ice cap, the Pat Buchanan's of the world would be freaking out. Currently, many Inuit coastal villages, there for generations are starting to be flooded, because the polar regions are experiencing global warming faster and with more consequence than we are. Their fish are moving away, and thus their livelihood. Polar bears might be extinct in 50 years. That's in my supposed lifetime! The average temperature in Alaska, they say, has gone up by several degrees in the last 100 years.
My man Al Gore, the best politician in history since Teddy Roosevelt when it comes to environmental matters, is the subject of a new documentary coming out slowly at the time. It's called Inconvenient Truths and I'm looking forward to it. It is supposed to be both riveting and scary as hell. And makes Gore look finally like the smart and committed pol he really is. Here is one review.
This all reminds me of a conversation I had a few years ago with a good friend of my parents. She and her husband are really neat and special people: I love them a lot. But they are really right-wing. And over a very expensive dinner at a restaurant this particular holiday I was home, my parent's friend suddenly went into a diatribe about global warming and about how Michael Crichton, of all people, had shown that it was all a myth. Not having read the Crichton book (and I still haven't), I didn't know really how to respond, but the arguments that she was making from the book were so superficially ludicrous to me from my scientific pre-rhetoric background, and from what I had read in the scientific journals I still peruse, I thought she was just nuts. After all, this is a fiction author who has written about resurrecting dinasaurs and created the idea for ER from his one year as a medical student. That against the overwhelming majority of scientific discourse! Unfortunately, my rhetorical skills deserted me in my state of flummox: all I could say was, "he's wrong." Lame. Weak. But true. Here is just one of many debunkings of Crichton's arguments. Here is another. And another. And another one. And that is only the first half page of Google search I performed. But, I was ashamed I couldn't make a better argument at the time. I'm better at arguing for Darwin, which has a eerily parallel set of ideologies whereas one side supports the empirical facts and the other side wants to believe something else but can only show it through ideology.
What is scary, though, is that I expect ordinary people like me or my parent's friend, who aren't experts in a particular scientific field, to have debates about scientific matters that depend on what they have read. What I don't expect is that the actual government do the same: the government, one would think, would base their decisions on the actual science that they pay the salaries of their employees for. But this administration has been actively censoring claims of global warming. I've written of this before. This is one of many even better accounts of how this is happening.
It seems that if the right wants to insist global warming is only the product of a cyclical environment, it is absolutely clear that the right is a product of a cyclical environment itself: that of medieval thinking. Science is being abandoned in leaps and bounds at the moment, but people aren't seeing how it is happening. It is cumulative: from the debates about evolution and creationism, to the debates about global warming, to those about stem cell research: we are quickly retrenching ourselves to a Puritan past.
I just recently saw an interesting documentary on the History Channel about the Scopes "monkey trial." The film concluded that even though the press at the time thought that Darrow had humiliated the evangelists of Tennessee, the reality was that evolution was quickly knocked out of most high school curriculums. By the late 1930s, over 70% of American high school science classrooms said nothing about Darwin's theories of science. What changed things? One word: Sputnik. Suddenly, it became apparent that science was something that Americans had to take seriously. And there was an influx in funding and design of science classes that was unprecedented in our history. All those black-and-white "junior science" films I watched as an elementary student in the 1970s were all products of the post-Sputnik Cold War scare.
Now, we are slipping back into laziness. The Cold War is over, and as a result, the push toward science is less felt as before. But as any scientist will tell you: nature abhors a vacuum. So if science isn't the pressing need, that need shifts. And what we see now is a need for faith. Unfortunately, that need had manifestly entrenched itself as a reactionary need. Faith must be the opposite of science. And as a result, normally intelligent people suddenly find themselves being persuaded by a rhetoric that says that science and religion cannot coexist. Thus: evolution is just a "theory"; and global warming is just a "cyclical process." What I call the "third awakening" in American culture is little more than a recycling of ancient ideas and a backlash against modernism. The Earth is ours to do what we want, for the end of the world is nigh. We need not worry what we do because it is our destiny. Et cetera.
There is a real risk, in my opinion, that if the current revival continues at its pace, we may be seeing a dismembering of science. I don't think that will happen. Contemporary cycles run too quickly, so in another twenty years there may very well be another shift away from faith and back to science. Or, there may be another crisis that spurs this nation into action. But as Santyana said, those who forget the past will be doomed to repeat it. Other countries continue unabated with science. If we fall behind, we only have ourselves to blame with the repercutions. The problem with global warming is that many of the nations now going gang busters on science are exactly those that are trying to catch up in terms of economics and industry. It's important to note that their emissions for global warming right now are not even close to ours, so we can still make a big impact, but the next 50 years will be a trying time. Can we wake up and do something before it is too late to repair the damage we have wrought? Or is the global warming scenario that almost everyone seems to suggest is a guarantee be the crisis that forces us to. And if that is the case, would we be too late to correct the problem?
It's a daunting question. My parents won't have to live with it. But I will. And my children, if I have them, and my niece and nephew, and their children, and I wonder what kind of climate they will inherit.
Damn. I'm condeming Bush again. Oh well.
I want to see the Gore movie to help me with my arguments, though.
But I takes the world around me seriously, and that informs my opinions. Nevertheless, I'm going to make an effort to change some foci to my blogging. For example, the current administration has sunk so far, so fast, that to chronicle all their abuses has to seem like "bashing" or "piling on." Of course, it's not; it's reporting. And it all should be reported. Like today: Cheney continues to make millions off of other people's misery. First with Haliburton, now with Katrina. I think history is going to show that Cheney is the biggest profiteer of war since the "golden age." If his five Vietnam deferments weren't enough, he's made millions off our adventures in the Middle East since he was Secretary of Defense during Bush 41.
I'm sorry. I said I wasn't going to do that. But then you have to wonder about this week's news that when the entire (the ENTIRE) administration was trumpeting that they finally found the WMD on May 29, 2003 (remember the "mobile biological labs?" I didn't think so; no one remembers anything anymore apart from what Fox News tells them to), they had actually gotten CIA memos two days before that specifically detailed what they really were--weather balloon research stations. And yet the administration adamently stressed that they then knew, KNEW, that they had found the WMDs. Look it up: Bush is on record saying as much on the 29th. Great: the Bushies had officially gotten in touch with the logic of the Roswell UFO freaks.
Damn, I did it again. I can't help myself. So let me get to the point of this original blog: global warming. You see, almost every scientist worth his or her salt knows now that global warming is real and getting dangerously close to crossing a threshold of no return. And its not just "cyclical" as many right-wingers will tell you, its been unprecendently accelerated by humans. According to current models based on the retreat of the glaciers and arctic ice in the polar regions, it is now being predicted that the Arctic Ocean may be completely ice-free by 2050, or at the very least by the end of the century. Now, this doesn't seem much to us, but I'll tell you, if we were Canada, and we had a significant population that depended on the polar ice cap, the Pat Buchanan's of the world would be freaking out. Currently, many Inuit coastal villages, there for generations are starting to be flooded, because the polar regions are experiencing global warming faster and with more consequence than we are. Their fish are moving away, and thus their livelihood. Polar bears might be extinct in 50 years. That's in my supposed lifetime! The average temperature in Alaska, they say, has gone up by several degrees in the last 100 years.
My man Al Gore, the best politician in history since Teddy Roosevelt when it comes to environmental matters, is the subject of a new documentary coming out slowly at the time. It's called Inconvenient Truths and I'm looking forward to it. It is supposed to be both riveting and scary as hell. And makes Gore look finally like the smart and committed pol he really is. Here is one review.
This all reminds me of a conversation I had a few years ago with a good friend of my parents. She and her husband are really neat and special people: I love them a lot. But they are really right-wing. And over a very expensive dinner at a restaurant this particular holiday I was home, my parent's friend suddenly went into a diatribe about global warming and about how Michael Crichton, of all people, had shown that it was all a myth. Not having read the Crichton book (and I still haven't), I didn't know really how to respond, but the arguments that she was making from the book were so superficially ludicrous to me from my scientific pre-rhetoric background, and from what I had read in the scientific journals I still peruse, I thought she was just nuts. After all, this is a fiction author who has written about resurrecting dinasaurs and created the idea for ER from his one year as a medical student. That against the overwhelming majority of scientific discourse! Unfortunately, my rhetorical skills deserted me in my state of flummox: all I could say was, "he's wrong." Lame. Weak. But true. Here is just one of many debunkings of Crichton's arguments. Here is another. And another. And another one. And that is only the first half page of Google search I performed. But, I was ashamed I couldn't make a better argument at the time. I'm better at arguing for Darwin, which has a eerily parallel set of ideologies whereas one side supports the empirical facts and the other side wants to believe something else but can only show it through ideology.
What is scary, though, is that I expect ordinary people like me or my parent's friend, who aren't experts in a particular scientific field, to have debates about scientific matters that depend on what they have read. What I don't expect is that the actual government do the same: the government, one would think, would base their decisions on the actual science that they pay the salaries of their employees for. But this administration has been actively censoring claims of global warming. I've written of this before. This is one of many even better accounts of how this is happening.
It seems that if the right wants to insist global warming is only the product of a cyclical environment, it is absolutely clear that the right is a product of a cyclical environment itself: that of medieval thinking. Science is being abandoned in leaps and bounds at the moment, but people aren't seeing how it is happening. It is cumulative: from the debates about evolution and creationism, to the debates about global warming, to those about stem cell research: we are quickly retrenching ourselves to a Puritan past.
I just recently saw an interesting documentary on the History Channel about the Scopes "monkey trial." The film concluded that even though the press at the time thought that Darrow had humiliated the evangelists of Tennessee, the reality was that evolution was quickly knocked out of most high school curriculums. By the late 1930s, over 70% of American high school science classrooms said nothing about Darwin's theories of science. What changed things? One word: Sputnik. Suddenly, it became apparent that science was something that Americans had to take seriously. And there was an influx in funding and design of science classes that was unprecedented in our history. All those black-and-white "junior science" films I watched as an elementary student in the 1970s were all products of the post-Sputnik Cold War scare.
Now, we are slipping back into laziness. The Cold War is over, and as a result, the push toward science is less felt as before. But as any scientist will tell you: nature abhors a vacuum. So if science isn't the pressing need, that need shifts. And what we see now is a need for faith. Unfortunately, that need had manifestly entrenched itself as a reactionary need. Faith must be the opposite of science. And as a result, normally intelligent people suddenly find themselves being persuaded by a rhetoric that says that science and religion cannot coexist. Thus: evolution is just a "theory"; and global warming is just a "cyclical process." What I call the "third awakening" in American culture is little more than a recycling of ancient ideas and a backlash against modernism. The Earth is ours to do what we want, for the end of the world is nigh. We need not worry what we do because it is our destiny. Et cetera.
There is a real risk, in my opinion, that if the current revival continues at its pace, we may be seeing a dismembering of science. I don't think that will happen. Contemporary cycles run too quickly, so in another twenty years there may very well be another shift away from faith and back to science. Or, there may be another crisis that spurs this nation into action. But as Santyana said, those who forget the past will be doomed to repeat it. Other countries continue unabated with science. If we fall behind, we only have ourselves to blame with the repercutions. The problem with global warming is that many of the nations now going gang busters on science are exactly those that are trying to catch up in terms of economics and industry. It's important to note that their emissions for global warming right now are not even close to ours, so we can still make a big impact, but the next 50 years will be a trying time. Can we wake up and do something before it is too late to repair the damage we have wrought? Or is the global warming scenario that almost everyone seems to suggest is a guarantee be the crisis that forces us to. And if that is the case, would we be too late to correct the problem?
It's a daunting question. My parents won't have to live with it. But I will. And my children, if I have them, and my niece and nephew, and their children, and I wonder what kind of climate they will inherit.
Damn. I'm condeming Bush again. Oh well.
I want to see the Gore movie to help me with my arguments, though.
posted by cc at
8:30 PM
1 Comments:
I have a longer comment I wanted to post here, but it crashed and disappeared on me. I will try to rewrite it later but I did want to say this, and it is not related to my other rant.
You made some comments about Michael Crichton. I have not read much of his work, and I have even grown bored with his ER creation. But what I enjoyed of his work so far is the challenge to agree or disagree with his work. Too bad people take fiction to heart too much and ignore the real pleasure you can get from such works, your own imagination.
Case to point, I really enjoyed Dan Brown's "Da Vinci Code". It has given me an avenue to discuss with people religon without starting a holy war. The funny thing about being in medicine, especially in Emergency Medicine, is that you will either become a religionist fanatic, or a cynic. This can really get a good heated debate going in the station or rig.
Anyhow, back to Brown's book. It is a fiction. It is not a reference book. A great tale of how things could have been. You know, the reasonable doubt thing? This kind of book will force you to ask tough questions that will either reveal the strength of your convictions, or of your doubts, of which you can explore more deeply. Dan Brown may be guilty of many things, but the good he has done is forced people to think.
There will always be people that will believe what they read, whether it is from a textbook, a work of fiction, the media, or the goverment. At least William Shatner will not starve to death thanks to these people with no life and believes entirely in Gene Roddenberry's creation.
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