A culture of stupidity

Have you ever wondered why someone would want to be deliberately stupid in a world that should know better? Ask a Republican. They will, of course, deny they’re stupid, but among themselves they acknowledge that they say stupid things in order to ensure the loyalty of certain voters, who will believe anything if it supports their biases.

Let’s take oil, for example — specifically, blaming the president for high gas prices, and getting away with it among these voters. Everyone knows oil prices are set on the world market — well almost everyone — and that despite reduced imports and increased domestic production, prices are going up anyway. Why? Because the US currently produces only about ten percent of the world’s oil, and there’s very little chance of changing that ratio any time soon, no matter where we mine the oil. With such a small contribution to world supply, we won’t impact world prices much.

And let’s not overlook the fact that we have to stop burning fossil fuels as soon as possible. That imperative is seldom part of the conversation about gas prices. Gas-powered cars are going to be with us for a while, so instead of kvetching about where the next drop of conventional oil is coming from, we need to get behind a program to make biofuels a practical reality. This is in everyone’s interests — even the stupid.

The common-sense Navy

Even as the GOP mocks biofuels, the US Navy is taking energy independence very seriously with a plan to have 50 percent of its total energy consumption coming from renewable sources by 2020. Now is this common sense or what? Well, I’m waiting for the Republicans in Congress to hold hearings on why the navy is so gosh-darned worried about a silly thing like national security.

Inhofe is a clear and present danger

Senator Jim Inhofe (R-OK) won’t be around long enough to personally destroy our habitat as we know it, but he seems determined to make sure the wheels of destruction will remain in motion.

Inhofe, one of the nation’s most prominent pinheads, recently published a book entitled The Greatest Hoax: How the Global Warming Conspiracy Threatens Your Future. On the Internet you can find a Tulsa World photo of Inhofe signing a copy of his book for an 11-year-old boy. In a world where justice prevailed, Inhofe would be charged with endangering the welfare of a child. You can go to jail for peddling porn to a kid, but you get off scot-free if you poison his mind with dangerous lies.

The premise for Inhofe’s book is that God controls climate, not humans. He believe that it’s arrogant of people to think they can do what only God can do. The senator has often declared global warming to be a hoax, and now he’s recorded his ignorance for the ages.

Like so many conservatives, Inhofe seems to be incapable of embarrassment or chagrin. He is obviously not smart enough to grasp the science that discredits his skewed reasoning. He fails to understand that the God he so reveres gave us minds and the option of using them. Thousands of scientists — God’s creations using their God-given brains, according to Inhofe’s faith — have deduced that global warming is the result of human activity, and to refute this is to allow that God is fallible.

So there it is, Jim. Thousands of God’s children, using the minds He gave them, have correctly assessed the evidence that humans have influenced the earth’s climate. You’re claiming that God made a mistake when he gave them the intelligence required to make this judgment, but you don’t have the reasoning skills required to grasp this either. I think if someone tried to explain that to you, your eyes would glaze over and you’d foam at the mouth.

Sorry to be so cruel, Jim, but you put yourself out there.

Warming skeptic sees the light

Good news for the environment — after a few years of study, a prominent global warming skeptic now agrees with the good guys that the planet is warming. Richard Muller, who works at the University of California, Berkeley, said that other scientists should have been as skeptical as he was, but now that he’s confirmed their views about global warming, the conclusions can be considered unbiased.

Okay, I’ll let him have that, but I’m not sure anyone was ever biased toward global warming. I think most scientists wished it wasn’t happening, even if they knew it was. What I love is the irony attached to this story. You see, Muller’s research was partly funded by the Koch brothers, who no doubt hoped for a different outcome.

No brainer, confirmed

I have to credit PBS for an April 20, 2011, NOVA episode called “Power Surge” for confirming my explanation of how human activity is warming the earth to prehistoric levels — and helping me out with a few useful factoids.

For instance, I can now state specifically that it was about 35 million years ago that the earth’s atmosphere was loaded with carbon dioxide, and that the planet was a verdant tropical orb. There was no ice at the poles, there were forests in Antarctica and alligators in South Dakota, and there were palm trees in the Rocky Mountains.

As was and continues to be part of a natural process, the lush vegetation sucked CO₂ out of the atmosphere, and when trees and plants died the CO₂ was buried. Over the millions of years that followed, the CO₂ compressed into coal, oil, and natural gas — what we now call fossil fuels — and as we release it, we will eventually return the planet to those prehistoric conditions.

Among the other stunning factoids? I learned that one gallon of gasoline represents about 100 tons of ancient plants. Yikes.

I’ve been writing about global warming for over 20 years, and it’s nice to be able to have more to go by than what I know in my gut. It’s even nicer to know that my gut has been right all along. Some of what my gut knows it learned in high school science, and I hope that helps vindicate the American public school system. The rest I’ve picked up along the way.

If I thought it would help, I’d tie our most prominent global warming deniers to chairs — James Inhofe and Rick Perry, for example — and force them to watch “Power Surge.” But I think both of them would squeeze their eyes shut and yell “no-no-no-no-no-no-no —” because the earth is only 6,000 years old and on the sixth day God created gas pumps.

(The conversation about) global warming goes away

Global warming seems to be a dead issue in the United States, which isolates us from the rest of the world. You have to wonder what’s going on in people’s minds when the number of people who believe global warming is real drops from 79 percent in 2006 to 59 percent currently. That’s comparable to 20 percent of the people changing their minds about the sum of two plus two.

Global warming isn’t something to believe in, like God. It’s logical, and it was a logical hypothesis even before the evidence began to mount. It’s supported by more facts than you can shake a stick at. But this seems to be a problem with Americans: when the rest of the world is looking ahead dozens and hundreds of years, we have trouble seeing beyond next week. Shockingly, when renewable, non-carbon energy sources should be our priority, we’re making a big push for a 2,000-mile oil pipeline from Canada and fracking natural gas from deep underground. Republican presidential candidate Rick Perry would kill off the EPA and dig up all the coal in the US.

It’s insane and dangerous to think global warming isn’t a settled issue, as Perry and other Republicans claim. While most of us won’t live to see the ultimate penalties for ignoring the climate change crisis, many are already suffering from its consequences. Scientists, always unwilling to make sweeping claims without an abundance of supporting evidence, now seem ready to blame the dramatic increase in violent weather events on global warming.

A colder than usual American winter in 2010 helped to dampen people’s interest in global warming as an issue. It was hardly warmer, right? What people miss is that global warming is bringing about changes in climate patterns. Even as the US experienced more cold and snow last winter, the planet still warmed, and the snowstorms themselves are right in line with what scientists predict — more violent weather, more precipitation. Look at the tornado season that followed. Look at the flooding. Look at the relentless heat in the summer, and the drought that set Texas on fire.

Other countries are looking at global warming as an opportunity to develop and invest in the technologies and industries of tomorrow. Not us. When we finally decide to update our energy infrastructure, we’ll be looking abroad for the parts we need.

After making bold promises about how he would combat global warming during the last presidential campaign, President Obama has gone quiet.  In 2008, discussing the rash of January tornadoes, The Weather Channel’s Severe Weather Expert, Dr. Greg Forbes, wrote that they were once rare — and over the last few years they’re becoming increasingly common. Let’s see what kind of weather January, 2012, brings, then let’s see what Obama has to say about it in his State of the Union speech next January. If he doesn’t bring up global warming in that address, then he’s taken his eye off the future.

Global warming isn’t new news

Turns out the first prediction about global warming was delivered by Columbia University geoscientist Wally Broecker in 1975, buried in the pages of the journal Science. Broecker’s projections of atmospheric carbon dioxide increases over the next 35 years have been almost spot on, as have his predicted temperature increases.

His calculations have been supported in the decades since by volumes of independent findings and modeling, and one respected physicist says that if you continually dump CO₂ into the atmosphere, there’s no other possible outcome. Untrained though I am, I arrived at the same conclusion in the early ’80s when I pondered the process of combustion and its effect on the atmosphere. When you burn something, not only do you release carbon dioxide into the air, you consume oxygen. Do this on a global scale, and the balance of atmospheric gases is bound to change.

Despite being a no-brainer, a stubborn contingent of deniers on the right continues to drive us toward environmental catastrophe by insisting that global warming science is a hoax. How they can keep doing this boggles the mind, considering how obvious it is. It’s far easier to understand how burning carbon-rich materials affects the atmosphere than how a wing creates lift, yet we take for granted that airplanes fly.

It’s frightening that such stupid people as Rick Perry and Michele Bachmann are vying to become president of the United States. Despite the economy and joblessness in the US, there is no more pressing issue than global warming.

Something to think about

There was probably a time when the Earth was ice-free. It was a long time ago, and back then there were probably no ice caps at the poles. Our climate engine was a lot different than it is today. A lot has changed since humans first started roaming the earth, and in that time we’ve adapted to the climate cycles as we know them now, give or take a relatively minor variation or two.

Back when there were no ice caps, there was probably also no coal and oil buried deep below the surface. Coal and oil were not naturally occurring materials in our planets original composition. They formed as the vegetation that was abundant back in those ice-free days died and were buried and compressed under thousands of feet, and even miles, of the changing surface of the earth. There’s millions and millions of years’ worth of compressed vegetation down below — and as we all know, vegetation is stored carbon dioxide.

So here we are, releasing all this stored carbon back into the atmosphere, far more rapidly than it took to store it up. Compare the 200-odd years we’ve been burning first coal and then oil to those millions and millions it took to put it there, and you’ll get the picture.

I would like to say something in person to all those senators and congress persons who think global warming is a hoax, or think it’s just part of a natural cycle, or say whatever pops into their heads to make their campaign donors happy. They’re full of shit, and they’re killing us. Their pea brains just cannot grasp the problem. They just don’t get it. Human activity IS affecting the global climate. Human activity IS changing the biosphere as we know it. Human activity IS rendering the planet inhospitable, and human activity WILL render it inhabitable.

For humans anyway.

Investing in the future

In past essays about global warming and alternate forms of energy, I’ve recalled the Manhattan Project that gave us the world’s first real weapon of mass destruction. It was a time of war, and the bomb was seen as a way to bring it to an end more quickly than we would without it. We would save American lives and materiel, shave months, perhaps years off the war, with this one awesome weapon. That we would obliterate two cities and countless lives in the process was an aside. It was a matter of national security.

Combating global warming is also a matter of national security, in that if we think of it as a war it would result in our independence from foreign oil and thus secure our energy needs forever. Never again would we face the threats of oil embargoes. Never again would we feel compelled to wage war to secure dwindling reserves of oil. But it goes beyond our own national security. It’s the security of humanity that’s at stake.

The original Manhattan Project cost $2 billion, and that’s 1940s’ dollars — about $20 billion in today’s dollars. Some 175,000 people were employed by the Project. It was an acceptable expenditure of American tax dollars. We were, after all, at war. The Manhattan Project could hardly be left up to the Free Market.

I would argue the same logic applies to the project of the new millenium, whatever name we give it. The Gaia project? What a great name that would be. The point is, we are in the midst of a war right now, and I’m not talking about Iraq. I’m talking about the war for energy independence, the war against global warming. Today, $20 billion is chump change, but it would go a long way toward getting our solar and wind industries way up off the ground. It would go a long way toward assuring that the United States were a leader among nations in the development and manufacture of alternative energy equipment. It would go a long way toward making is secure at last. And it would put a lot of people to work in decent jobs.

Common cents

Despite almost overwhelming evidence, there are still many who doubt that human activity is causing global warming. For this reason, many of them don’t see this as a reason to change the way we supply our energy — and many don’t even think we need to at all.

Global warming aside, there are other reasons to move away from fossil fuels. National security, for example. The technology exists to make us independent from foreign oil, to permit us to be the sole supplier of our own energy. What more reason would we need?

Well, we’re also addicted to coal, with about half of our electricity coming from coal-fired plants. Coal mining ravages the landscape, adversely affects local and regional ecosystems, and the jobs it creates are filled with risks. What coal miner wouldn’t prefer a job in a plant that made wind turbines or solar panels to one that required a descent into the bowels of the earth, where tunnel collapses and explosions are very real threats.

And there are still other reasons. Were the fledgling companies now manufacturing and marketing alternative energy systems in the US encouraged to grow because of incentives and increased demand, it would be comparable to the oil boom of the early 20th century. Those wise enough to invest would profit. New jobs would be created, good-paying jobs. Tax revenues would rise. And the trade deficit would shrink.

More reasons? Eventually energy costs would come down and stabilize, consumers would have more money to spend, save or invest, and the economy would begin a steady, sustainable climb.

Still more reasons? Well, if these aren’t enough already, I’ll think of some more.