Sword and Sextant

Blech, the bailout bill has passed, and I don’t have the will to eviscerate it any longer.  Onward, then!

We’ve known this for a long time, but the Global Warming/Climate Change debate has ceased to contain any real science, and has become a political talking point on both sides of the aisle.  This absolutely needs to stop, for the good of our country and the world (in that order).

I do not have a huge stake in this debate, except that I am determined to fight against the tide of policies that will stem from the most recent hysteria in the media.  I won’t spend a whole lot of time on the basics, as we all know them by now.  There is some force(s), it is said, that is warming our planet beyond normal temperature cycles.  This force, if we don’t take huge action, will destroy our planet enough to alter (and presumably worsen) our way and quality of life.  We have to use the government of this country and the rest of the world to force new energy technologies and policies (using taxes and other pressures) to ensure our survival and the health of the planet. The force is man’s pollution, and we have to change it right now to save ourselves.

Now, there are several debates raging within those statements, such as whether man is the true force, or the Sun, or oceans, clouds, etc.  Also, some say that global temperatures aren’t changing, and others still cling to the fear of the next ice age.  Yes, there are still relics that believe our death lies in global cooling.  Isn’t that odd, and instructive all at once?  They urge many measures to increase our global temperatures so we might be saved from the coming crisis, all with the same ferocity of the newer warming scientists.  And yet, two decades later, we’re arguing about the categorically opposite crisis?

I realize that pride and ego are huge faults in our society, and the problem is merely magnified in the government, where its members were literally chosen to lead their peers.  Its hard for the government to self-evaluate at any point, or to look beyond the scope of about 12 months.  Simply consider the war in Iraq:

The huge support for action after 9/11,

the huge support in Congress for the President and latest intelligence in Afghanistan,

the huge support in Congress for the President and latest intelligence in Iraq,

flagging support for Iraq after it wasn’t easy or quick, relative ignorance of Afghanistan,

lack of support for Iraq in quagmire status, complete forgetting of Afghanistan,

resistance, then support of Iraq based on surge’s success, rememberance of Afghanistan,

new focus on Afghanistan as “the real front” now that Iraq is likely drawing to a favorable close.

(Note: Not addressing any Iraq War debate right now.  If you disagree, let it go this one time.)

Our politicians play a game of Panic Button every single day, it seems.  The GW/CC debate is not different in that we are trading one crisis for another on a regular basis, and they also share in common that the debate has been completely displaced by a simple partisan attitude that replaces facts with party registration, and turns thinking citizens into likely voter statisctics.  “Deniers” (as in Holocaust deniers, of all horrid things) are painted as George Bush clones and planet haters, and believers are painted as hippies and Sierra Club, drum-circle druggies.

Let me be the next (definitely not the first) to stand before you yelling “STOP”!  The simple fact that we very recently thought an Ice Age would kill us is very direct evidence that we don’t understand how our climate works.  Put another way: we trust meteorologists and climatologists to tell us what the entire Earth will do in 10, 20, even 50 years and beyond while they can’t tell us if its going to rain tomorrow?  Can we just admit that we don’t know?  It takes courage and confidence to remember that we don’t know everything, despite what the news and scientists tell you.  I promise they wouldn’t be scientists if they knew it all, because there wouldn’t be anything to study.

Like I said, I don’t win or lose based on the fictionality/reality of GW/CC.  Nobody does.  A policy of running amok with legislation will not fix anything, however.  What if Global Warming turned out to be worse than we’d feared, yet we had taken every measure prescribed during the Global Cooling “crisis”?  Where would we be then?

I suspect some view this as an opportunity to use government to take freedoms and shift toward socialism, but this article is not about them.  Most are simply swept up in the tide and fervor of partisanship, and they have forgotten what science is actually about.  You make a hypothesis, and test it with experimentation.  The results validate or invalidate your hypothesis.  Then, you make another.  Writing Armageddon scenarios in Time magazine based on computer models has little merit other than ginning up NSF dollars for more research grants on the matter.  Model is a euphemism for theory, as in guess, or unproven.  Also, there is no quorum at which theory becomes fact.  800,000 unproven theories amount to nothing without proof.  One cannot overwhelm reality with superior numbers.

Drop your party’s platform and stop accusing those with differing viewpoints of lying.  They are under the same spell you are.  Let the scientific debate rage in the scientific community, and don’t let politicians ruin it again.  Its hard, but admit that you don’t know.  Remember the number of “coming calamities” that have never come to pass in our lives, and use that prism to remain calm when the next one comes out of the media factory.  Its awfully difficult to sell papers or win viewers without crisis, so keep that in mind when the headlines claim our world is on the brink of sure destruction.

Its important to consider every theory on GW/CC, but also to remain impartial until the facts come out.  Also, if the facts can’t be obtained (which may be the case), choosing one theory and fighting for it is as foolish as betting your entire savings in a horse race by choosing the horse whose mane is best trimmed.  It may be the determining factor in how fast a horse runs, but it might not be, and the riskis high.  Remember, our lives may be at stake one of these days, and BETTING ON THE WRONG SIDE WOULD SPELL CERTAIN DISASTER!

Just kidding.