During the record two-foot snow and -19 degree weather, a relative called to see how we were faring. After I described the apocalyptic scenario, he laughed and quipped, “Here’s where we need Al Gore!”
Right. Global warming. My relative’s implication - if we had global warming like Al Gore said, then we wouldn’t be having such cold weather.
Wrong. Extreme weather events are exactly what scientists have been predicting for years. It’s unfortunate that the issue first got branded “global warming,” because it’s more like “global weirding.” The scientists call it “global climate change.”
Warmer summers push more moisture into the atmosphere generating more moisture for winter snows.
Water from melted Arctic ice absorbs sunlight rather than reflecting it, raising northern temperatures that generate high pressure systems which push cold Arctic air into Russia, northern Europe and now Fayetteville, Arkansas.
NASA’s temperature figures show the first eleven months of 2010 were the warmest since instrumental records began 131 years ago. Droughts and floods in China, India, Pakistan, Russia, Australia and Brazil: Would these events have happened if atmospheric carbon dioxide had remained at its pre-industrial level of 280 parts per million?” asked NASA’s James Hansen.
“Almost certainly not.”
Earth’s carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is now 385 parts per million (ppm) and rising. Climate specialists say that for us to preserve the kind of planet like the one we have evolved on, it needs to be reduced to 350 ppm.
The human suffering from this year’s weather-related catastrophes is enormous.
And for the second year of the past three, we have a global food crisis. World food prices hit a record high last month. We don’t feel it so much in the U.S., but it is the stuff famine is made of elsewhere.
Maybe the most devastating impact of human-caused global warming is a recently measured 40 percent decline in the ocean’s phytoplankton since 1950. That decline is directly linked to the rise in ocean sea surface temperatures. Phytoplankton produce half the world’s oxygen and takes in harmful carbon dioxide. Oceans’ growth in acidity is 10 times faster today than 55 million years ago when a mass extinction of marine species occurred.
My cousin laughs all of this off like it’s a kooky scientists’ conspiracy. He sees a lot of conspiracies.
He gets most of his news from Fox and from e-mail forwarded from like-minded buddies. He’s a nice guy, buthe lives in a world with a lot of unreality.
We ignore reality at our peril. Too much of our public discourse is driven by emotional reactions bypassing reason and fact.
Where does this “ignoring evidence because it is inconvenient” come from?
Whatever its origins, it is damaging to us. Traditional spiritual directors say that a failure to embrace reality will freeze one’s spiritual growth. Large swaths of our society are frozen and failing to grow.
Some of our churches teach their followers that evolution is false and threatening. Those churches align themselves with falsehood. That’s not healthy. Evolution is as real as the earth’s revolving around the sun. Evolution has been so successful at describing the reality of life that it functions more like a fundamental principle than like a theory.
Often when students raised in anti-evolution churches learn in high school or college how accurately evolution describes and predicts our living reality, they find themselves in a faith crisis. They ask themselves, “If my church was wrong about this, what else are they wrong about?” That’s kind of nice for the Episcopal Church. We get a lot of thinking Christians moving our way when they realize they’ve been fed some nonsense.
Science doesn’t get everything right, of course, but science has a strong tradition of demanding evidence, peer review and rewarding new discovery.
When science says evolution is true and the planet is changing drastically, wisdom demands we pay attention.
Actually, climate change is old news. In 1970 my freshman biology teacher did something unforgettable during our last class.
She confessed how her generation had failed to see the warning signals and had not acted to preserve the earth. She told us about warming patterns, extinctions and pollution.
Tears formed in her eyes.
She told us that we would be the last generation to have a chance to reverse the trends.
The evidence and the numbers are only worse since then. So far my generation has mostly ignored the signals too.
LOWELL GRISHAM IS AN EPISCOPAL PRIEST WHO LIVES IN FAYETTEVILLE.
Opinion, Pages 13 on 02/20/2011