Dear Readers,
A week ago, my wife, my little brother and I hiked to the top of Mount Wrightson, which is in the Santa Rita Mountains, about an hour south of Tucson. It was gorgeous. The sun, the wind, the physical exertion, the ice chunks frozen on the tree limbs... it had been too long since I had been on a hike. A walk in the woods is very mentally restorative. Except I had a headache afterwards, so maybe it wasn’t mentally restorative after all. Ha ha ha.
When we got to Baldy Saddle, about a mile from the peak, we asked a young couple what time it was. We told them we wanted to get down the mountain before sunset. The guy held up his fists to the sky and shifted them one beneath another and told us we had about 3 and a half hours before dark.
I said, “Wow, where did you learn that neat fist trick?”
He said, “I learned it from a survivalist class I took at Northern Arizona University, in Flagstaff.”
I said, “Hey, my wife and I went to NAU.”
So we chatted for a bit, and found out that the lady was studying Environmental Science, and the gentleman was pursuing a Masters degree in Climate Science.
“Uh oh,” I said. “Well, in the interest of full disclosure, I think I should tell you that I am a global warming denier.”
He was taken aback, and said, “Uh… everybody has his or her beliefs. That's OK. I'm a Buddhist, so I forgive you.”
I said, “Even if global warming is true, there's nothing we can do about it." I was about to say that China and India don't care about stopping global warming, farting cows don't care about stopping global warming, and water vapor doesn't care about stopping global warming, so if none of those other things cut back on their carbon emissions, will it really help "save the planet" if I start taking cloth bags to the grocery store? But I held my tongue. I wanted to answer Obama's call for civility in public discourse.
He said, "No, we'll get there. One person can make a difference. I think everything’s going to be alright, if we all work together and get on the same page.”
“You guys are Buddhist?” I asked, changing the subject to something less controversial.
“We try to follow the ways of the Buddha. Yeah.”
I said, "Well I think reincarnation ain't nothin' but a bunch of hooey."
Ha ha ha! Just kidding. What I really said was, “We're Mormon," and then I changed the subject back to global warming, and tried to agree to disagree, you know what I mean? I said, "Well, I guess you don't have to go into global warming research with your Climate Science degree. Maybe there’s other things you could do.”
“No, I’m going into global warming.”
Then there was an awkward silence.
"Do you guys want some Triscuits or some marshmallows or something?" I asked.
They declined.
My wife and my brother and I parted ways from the college couple. Once we were out of earshot, my wife said I had been a little rude. My brother said maybe I was just a little rude, but not very rude, and it wasn’t a big deal anyway.
I didn’t mean to be rude. I hope I wasn’t rude. I don’t want to be a rude guy. I can understand how it would be uncomfortable for global warming researchers to be confronted with global warming skeptics.
But I think I was very cordial to the young liberal college couple while still expressing my differing views. I think it’s a big deal that global warming is a hoax. I think more people need to talk about the whole thing skeptically without fear of being politically or socially reprimanded. (Rick Perry, for example, has been unashamed of his global warming skepticism.) The more global warming skeptics stay silent, the more the hoax will consume tax dollars, resources, and human potential.
I mean, this young guy was bright and talented, despite being stereotypically liberal. He could be going into an honorable career as an architect or as an astronaut or who knows what, instead of turning himself into a global warming researcher forever applying for government grants, or a goon from the Environmental Protection Agency. I think it’s ridiculous that so many college students want to “go into global warming” as a career. What kind of a career is that?
Human-caused global warming is a big fat hoax, perpetuated by the folks who profit from it.
We saw the same couple later on, at the peak of Mount Wrightson. They were eating Odwalla bars and hummus. I thought as a way to mend possibly hurt feelings, I would bring up the most non-controversial topic in the world: the weather. I asked, in the friendliest manner I could muster, “So, what's the weather like in Flagstaff these days?”
"Unusually warm,” he replied.
How clever. I knew what he was hinting at.
Sincerely,
Telemoonfa
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
9 comments:
It's hard to believe someone can be such a simpleton. You must be one of the stupidest persons on the planet, or more likely, you are just pretending to be one.
So all the other global warming skeptics are simpletons too? I'm not the only one who believes that global warming is a hoax. Lots of scientists think global warming is overblown if not a pure concoction.
http://www.businessinsider.com/the-ten-most-important-climate-change-skeptics-2009-7#
And then there are people like Bjorn Lomborg who think that while anthropogenic global warming might be legit, it's not worth fighting, because there are more pressing environmental matters to attend to.
I'm not pretending to be stupid! This is the real me, OK? I really really think global warming is a hoax.
Sometimes I wish people like you couldn't vote. But then I remember that you have a right to vote, and I respect that, and I love America and blah blah blah. No offense. I'm sure you're a great person. Merry Christmas.
Effectively addressing climate change will require over the coming decades a fundamental remaking of energy production, transportation and agriculture around the world — the sinews of modern life. It is simply too big a job for the men and women who have gathered for the talks under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, the 1992 treaty that began this grinding process.
“There is a fundamental disconnect in having environment ministers negotiating geopolitics and macroeconomics,” said Nick Robins, an energy and climate change analyst at HSBC, the London-based global bank. Mr. Robins noted that the 20-year-old framework convention and the 1997 Kyoto Protocol that amended it enshrined a two-tiered system in which so-called developed and developing countries are treated differently. China still is classified as a developing country and is thus exempt from any emissions limits, but it has a vastly larger economy than it had in 1992 and recently surpassed the United States as the world’s largest emitter of greenhouse gases.
“They are working from a 20th-century agreement,” Mr. Robins said. “We’re now in another century.”
The United States is determined to sweep away those distinctions and work toward a system where all countries are bound by the same rules. The conference here in Durban kept the tiered system alive for another few years, but it is fading. And by the time the next phase of the Kyoto Protocol expires in 2020, a good many leaders hope that it will be gone for good.
Among the modest achievements of the conference, which was nearing an end on Saturday, was progress toward the creation of a Green Climate Fund, which is to help mobilize a promised $100 billion a year in public and private funds by 2020 to assist developing nations in adapting to climate change and converting to clean energy sources.
Negotiators left for another day the precise sources of the money and how and by whom it would be disbursed. But in discussing this question last week, Todd D. Stern, the chief American climate negotiator, revealed his own qualms about the inability of the United Nations climate bureaucracy to deal with the broad political and financial questions posed by climate change.
“We want to see a green fund that is going to draw in a lot of capital from countries all over the world, including the United States,” Mr. Stern said at a briefing. “And although I love climate negotiators and spend much of my time with them, they are not necessarily the most qualified people to run a multibillion-dollar fund.”
Mary D. Nichols, chairwoman of the California Air Resources Board, which arguably has done more to reduce carbon pollution in the United States than any other body, was in Durban as an observer. Ms. Nichols said that given the inability of the international bureaucracy or the United States Congress to move decisively on global warming, the job would increasingly fall to the states and local governments.
“Instead of waiting for them to negotiate some grand bargain, we have to keep working on the ground,” she said. “Progress is going to come from the bottom up, not the top down. That’s just reality.”
Aaron McCright's study, "Cool dudes: The denial of climate change among conservative white males in the United States," was published online in July and printed in the October 2011 issue of Global Environmental Change, which ranks first out of 77 journals on environmental studies.
The study has created somewhat of a buzz, said Riley Dunlap, co-author and professor of sociology at Oklahoma State University. The paper was well received in academic circles, but he admitted he was concerned about a backlash from the conservative movement.
But from McCright's perspective it was important to find out to what extent the sharp debate over climate change at the elite level had trickled down into the general public in recent decades. "Within the ranks of elites, climate change denialists are overwhelmingly conservative white males," reads the report, pointing to figures like talk show host Rush Limbaugh and Marshall Institute CEO, William O'Keefe. "Does a similar pattern exist in the American public?"
McCright and Dunlap's analysis used polling data on climate change denial from 10 Gallup surveys from 2001 to 2010. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, 72.4 percent of the American population reported as white in 2010, and 77.1 percent in the year 2000. This majority made it difficult to draw conclusions about the relationship between other races and climate change, said McCright, because the Gallup survey sample size was so small.
To test for the trend amongst conservative white males, the researchers compared the demographic to "all other adults." Results showed, for instance, that 29.6 percent of conservative white males believe the effects of global warming will never happen, versus 7.4 percent of other adults. In holding for "confident" conservative white males, the study showed 48.4 percent believe global warming won't happen, versus 8.6 percent of other adults.
As a point of comparison, McCright also tested the beliefs of conservative white females. He found 14.9 percent believe the effects of global warming will never happen to 29.6 percent of their male counterparts. McCright said the finding is due more to the women's political stance than their gender or race. The data on conservative white females was not published in the "Cool dudes" study.
To understand why there is a trend amongst conservative white males, the Gallup data was cross-examined with research about the "white male effect" -- the idea that white males were either more accepting of risk or less risk averse than the rest of the public.
The white male effect could stem from the notion that, historically, white males have faced fewer obstacles in life, said McCright. But another school of thought sees the adoption of risk tied to personal values. "It has to do with their identity as an in-group," he said. "Something that would challenge the status quo is something [conservative white males] want to shun."
According to the literature on "identity protective cognition," people believe messages coming from the people they identify with most and ignore messages that are contrarian, Dunlap said. While all groups have a tendency to do this, he said, in the case the climate change, conservative white males are especially likely to exhibit this self-protecting characteristic.
McCright says, up to 40 percent of all white males in the study sample believe in hierarchy, are more trusting of authority and are more conservative. Conservative white males' motivation to ignore a certain risk -- the risk of climate change in this case -- therefore, has to do with defending the status of their identity tied to the white male establishment.
This result is bolstered by the Yale University "Global Warming's Six Americas" report for May. The study found that none of the "dismissive" group -- those who don't think the climate is changing or want legislation -- believe global warming will harm the United States in 50 years. The dismissive group also skews male and conservative, said "Six Americas" co-author, Edward Maibach, director of the George Mason University Center for Climate Change Communication.
But for Donald Braman, associate professor of law at George Washington University, who works on risk perception studies, the focus on white males and climate change could be somewhat misleading. "My worry is that [McCright's paper] might suggest to people that there is something distinctive about the way conservatives and officially, conservative white men, deal with new information," he said. "The truth is that those same cognitive mechanisms push all of our buttons."
Braman says a similar effect reveals itself amongst progressives when it comes to concerns about nuclear power, for instance. In the Yale Law School "Second National Risk & Culture Study" researchers found that despite expert opinions espousing the relative safety of certain forms of nuclear energy, progressives are still concerned about it, Braman said.
Values shape factual beliefs across an array of phenomenon, he said. "If it's conservative white males on global warming, pick a different issue and you'll find another group that has trouble thinking in a way that agrees with experts."
The political divide on climate change was concentrated in the run-up to the Kyoto Protocol in 1997, McCright said. At that time most global warming skepticism came from public figures, he said. But in 2000, climate change beliefs held predominantly by conservative white elites started to spread.
"Conservative think tanks, conservative media, corporations, and industry associations (especially for the fossil fuels industry) -- domains dominated by conservative white males -- have spearheaded the attacks on climate science and policy from the late 1980s to the present," McCright and Dunlap concluded in their study. "The results presented here show that conservative white males in the general public have become a very receptive audience for these efforts."
So what does McCright and Dunlap's research mean for climate regulation? Climate change denial has increased across all sectors of the American general public over the last decade, write the authors. And as they conclude in another recent study on the politicization of climate change published earlier this year in the journal Sociology Quarterly, "we expect that the political divide within the general public may further inhibit the creation of effective climate policy."
Perhaps, like the trend of denial among conservative white males, there is nothing too surprising about that conclusion. But for Maibach of George Mason University, McCright and Dunlap's findings do bring something new to the bargaining table.
"If you are advocating for climate legislation is helps to understand your opponents. Or if you have opponents, it's good to understand them to effectively engage with them," he said. "One [approach] is more combative, the other is more about conflict resolution. In either case it helps to know who you're dealing with."
A recent estimate suggests that the perennially frozen ground known as permafrost, which underlies nearly a quarter of the Northern Hemisphere, contains twice as much carbon as the entire atmosphere.
Temperatures are warming across much of that region, primarily, scientists believe, because of the rapid human release of greenhouse gases. Permafrost is warming, too. Some has already thawed, and other signs are emerging that the frozen carbon may be becoming unstable.
“It’s like broccoli in your freezer,” said Kevin Schaefer, a scientist at the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colo. “As long as the broccoli stays in the freezer, it’s going to be O.K. But once you take it out of the freezer and put it in the fridge, it will thaw out and eventually decay.”
If a substantial amount of the carbon should enter the atmosphere, it would intensify the planetary warming. An especially worrisome possibility is that a significant proportion will emerge not as carbon dioxide, the gas that usually forms when organic material breaks down, but as methane, produced when the breakdown occurs in lakes or wetlands. Methane is especially potent at trapping the sun’s heat, and the potential for large new methane emissions in the Arctic is one of the biggest wild cards in climate science.
Scientists have declared that understanding the problem is a major priority. The United States Department of Energy and the European Union recently committed to new projects aimed at doing so, and NASA is considering a similar plan. But researchers say the money and people devoted to the issue are still minimal compared with the risk.
For now, scientists have many more questions than answers. Preliminary computer analyses, made only recently, suggest that the Arctic and sub-Arctic regions could eventually become an annual source of carbon equal to 15 percent or so of today’s yearly emissions from human activities.
But those calculations were deliberately cautious. A recent survey drew on the expertise of 41 permafrost scientists to offer more informal projections. They estimated that if human fossil-fuel burning remained high and the planet warmed sharply, the gases from permafrost could eventually equal 35 percent of today’s annual human emissions.
The experts also said that if humanity began getting its own emissions under control soon, the greenhouse gases emerging from permafrost could be kept to a much lower level, perhaps equivalent to 10 percent of today’s human emissions.
Conservatives who sensibly dislike both the centralized regulation of most environmental policy and the untethered apocalypticism of much of the environmental movement have tended to respond with a non sequitur: the environment has mostly become a cause of the Left, therefore environmental problems are either phony or are not worth considering. To be sure, many environmental problems have been overestimated, and the proposed remedies are problematic from several points of view, but conservatives, with only a handful of exceptions, have ceased sustained reflection on how to assess environmental problems seriously, or how to craft non-bureaucratic and non-coercive remedies for many genuine problems that require solutions.
The tortured course that has led to the extreme polarization of environmental issues is beyond the scope of this comment, but suffice it to say that this polarization has been deleterious to both the aims of the environmental movement -- which has allowed environmentalism to become so strongly associated with the aims of the Left as to be no longer worth conservatives competing for -- and the long-term political viability of American conservatism, which has at this point almost entirely conceded areas of sustained public concern (environmental health, the provision of parks, and the protection of wildlife and scenic landscapes) to its political opponents.
There is a small subculture on the Right, known as "free market environmentalism," that offers an alternate path toward environmental protection consistent with conservative principles, including respect for property rights, a strong preference for markets, and our congenital suspicion of government and regulation. The conservative movement would be well served to take those ideas more seriously.
Of course, from a quick perusal of your blog posts, you seem to be one conservative -- an embarrassment, in my opinion -- incapable of taking any ideas seriously. Your simplistic, jejune dopiness permeates everything you touch. You, Telemoonfa, may indeed be a conservative, but you are such a complete idiot that you only hold the movement up to ridicule.
Anonymous,
Hey it looks like you left a comment that wasn't copied and pasted from somewhere! And you seem really fixated on this global warming thing. And you're a good writer. That's great.
You call me an idiot a lot, but something keeps you coming back to my blog to leave comments.
As you know, I'm not a global warming expert. I'm not even a global warming amateur. But I represent a lot of people who are skeptical about global warming. I also have the opinion that even if human-caused global warming is real, there's not much we can do about it. How do you get around the fact that no matter how hard environmentalists scream about cutting carbon emissions, China won't do it? Global warming, if it's a problem at all, is a practical problem and you need a practical solution. China is drastically increasing its carbon emissions daily, and shows no interest in cutting them, ever. Canada just withdrew from the Kyoto protocol to help their economy (and good for them, I say). Europe hasn't made any real progress on the global warming front, unless psychologically damaging children is progress. There's been a lot of talk, a lot of "treaties," a lot of expensive conferences, a lot of poetry, and a lot of studies, and what has come of it all? Awareness? What good will "awareness" do when the sea levels are wiping out coast lines and we're all baking at 140 degrees?
My advice to the environmentalists bent of fixing global warming is: GIVE UP. Look, you gave it a good shot. You tried to get the whole world to cut carbon emissions, but it's just too big of a problem for you to fix. (And it's not a real problem anyway.) The world is too vast and China is too stubborn. But be proud of your efforts, be proud of your valiant fight for a noble cause. Be proud, but now it's time to throw in the towel. And when the last polar bear finally dies, you can have the pleasure of telling all the deniers, "See, I told you so."
You see me as a conservative white male. I see myself as reasonable person.
How many people has global warming killed? Zero. How many people has global warming injured? Zero.
Now, how many people have gotten diseases from dirty water sources? Too many. How many people have suffered from a lack of vaccinations? Too many. How many people have suffered from a lack of sanitation? Too many. How many people, especially Africans, have had their lives shortened because they have indoor fires without proper ventilation? Too many.
Can we put global warming into perspective, please?
Post a Comment