An inevitable milestone

When I saw the headline of this NY Times lead article, I knew it meant we had reached an average daily CO₂ level of 400 parts per million. We don’t know if we’ve passed the point of no return, but if we haven’t, it sure won’t be long.

That the US is no longer the leading emitter of carbon dioxide is irrelevant. This distinction falls to China, and it’s possible that we may win back the “honor” before too long because the Chinese are probably smarter about science than we are.

Take this, for example: “The CO₂ levels in the atmosphere are rather undramatic,” Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA) said in a Congressional hearing a few years ago when he tried to play down the role of carbon dioxide in managing our global climate because it only amounts to 0.04 percent of the total atmosphere. Why he wasn’t laughed out of the House is pretty clear: politicians in general and Republicans in particular are dangerously ignorant about atmospheric science — although at least Democrats believe what virtually all the world’s real scientists tell them. But the fact is, this relatively tiny amount of one gas makes the planet habitable and has everything to do with how much heat is trapped close to the earth’s surface — and we’ve known this for a long time. It’s not theory, it’s not subject to debate, it’s a scientific fact.

And as we all know, Republicans are seldom interested in facts. And even if some of them know in their hearts that climate change is real and it’s caused by human activity, they don’t dare let on to their corporate masters. If their constituents are uninformed, they can inform them. They just won’t.

I’ve written about global warming here before — apparently at least 52 times — and here and elsewhere I broke down the science as I understood it. What’s happening now is that we appear to be rushing headlong to return to conditions that prevailed during the Eocene epoch — a world vastly different from today’s.

While China may be the new leader in global carbon emissions, the US still plays a leadership role — and the US certainly cannot preach what it doesn’t practice. But even if the world were to magically able to reduce our avoidable carbon emissions to zero overnight, atmospheric CO₂ would continue to rise for the foreseeable future, and there’s no telling where it would level off and begin to reverse. But I won’t be around to see it, which makes me wonder why I care. Well maybe I care because survival of the species is an instinct all living creatures possess. The problem with some humans, though (the Koch brothers, for instance), is that their instinct to be rich might be stronger — and of course that’s a problem for all mankind.

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.

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.

Logic says human activity behind global warming

In a recent post about Rick Perry, I pointed out that in something like 250 years we’ve released much of the carbon into the atmosphere that it took nature millions of years to compress and store beneath the earth’s surface. This simple fact supports the logical argument that human activity is responsible for global warming in the current era. While climate-change deniers sometimes admit that the earth is warming (there’s too much evidence to say otherwise), they insist that it’s part of a natural cycle, that human activity has nothing to do with it. This, of course, is industry speaking. People like Rick Perry don’t have the brains to manufacture such a lie.

The science isn’t difficult to comprehend. There was a time in the earth’s early history when it was much warmer than it is now, and that period coincided with higher levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide, the principal greenhouse gas. Much of that carbon became oil and coal over many millions of years as life forms died and were covered over before they could decompose and re-release that carbon into the atmosphere. This is why oil, gas, and coal are called “fossil fuels” — they’re the fossilized remains of carbon-based life forms. They’re referred to as “non-renewable” because they take so long to form. They would still all be in the ground if it wasn’t for us.

So here it is in a nutshell: releasing millions of years’ worth of stored carbon back into the atmosphere by burning it isn’t part of the natural cycle — it’s human intervention in a natural cycle. It’s an unnatural event that’s been going on since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. It’s as Pogo said — “We have met the enemy, and he is us.”

Rick Perry — the face of the dark ages

I’m thinking about the possible effect on the future of mankind of a president who thinks global warming is a hoax. It’s hard to understand why an educated person can’t grasp the science behind it. It’s pretty simple. Nature spent millions of years turning carbon-based life forms into fossil fuels beneath the surface of the earth. Humans have dug or pumped up much of it and burned it since the beginning of the first Industrial Revolution in the 18th century, releasing the carbon into the atmosphere. Carbon dioxide is a primary greenhouse gas. It traps heat in the atmosphere, which makes the planet habitable. The more carbon dioxide, the more heat will be trapped. Simple, right? This is something we can measure, and it doesn’t take a genius to link warming with the accelerated combustion of fossil fuels.

Climate change deniers charge that the overwhelming majority of the world’s scientists who agree that global warming is real and influenced by human activity are part of some vast conspiracy to delude the world just so they can keep receiving research grants. They prefer to cite instead the handful of dissenting scientists who are in the employ of oil and coal companies.

Real scientists believe that the principal side-effect of global warming is climate change, and we are amassing more and more evidence each year to support that belief. This is the part of the science that’s not exact, but we’re seeing the very dramatic changes in weather patterns that have been predicted since the 1980s and perhaps earlier. The increasing severe weather events and polar melting are two of the most visible indicators.

Right now Rick Perry, the Republican primary frontrunner, is staunchly in the denier camp. This alone should disqualify him as a presidential contender, but there he is at the top of the heap — and he could win, if voter anxiety over jobs and the economy doesn’t ease.

Perry isn’t alone. Global warming denial seems to be at the top of the Republican primary platform, with only John Huntsman firmly on the side of common sense. So imagine a world with its leading democracy firmly entrenched in the dark ages of science.

The pain in their heads

For most people, brain freeze (sphenopalatine ganglioneuralgia) occurs when they eat something cold, like ice cream. For many Republicans, it occurs when they have to process facts.