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One rule of opinion writing is that you don’t warp the position you oppose, then beat up on a straw man. One, it’s unfair. Two, it leaves readers less well informed, not better.
Which is why Jack Kelly’s truly bizarre column headlined “Globull Warming,” in the Sunday Post-Gazette, is as irresponsible as it is comically easy to rip apart.
Kelly, the P-G‘s resident right-wing hatchet man, begins by citing a recent interview between Eve Ensler and CNN’s Joy Behar in which Vagina Monologues playwright Ensler appears to blame climate change for tsunamis and earthquakes.
The bigger question is, Why should the opinions expressed by a playwright on a chat show even come into play? Why doesn’t Kelly take on, say, NASA, whose data unequivocally shows that the planet is warming?
Kelly’s other sources include “Minnesota blogger John Hinderaker” (who Kelly tells us gets some of his information about moose populations from “recent news accounts”) and Kelly’s fellow right-wing pundit Jonah Goldberg. (Kelly does cite two researchers, on the matter of polar-bear populations and the prevalence of malaria, but neither of them addresses the issue of whether the earth is growing warmer.)
The closest Kelly gets to accurately stating the case he’s attempting to refute is to quote “journalists” who tell us that “climate isn’t weather.” Well, those journalists are right — it’s not. And scientists, of course, say the same thing. When I interviewed University of Pittsburgh climatologist Mike Rosenmeier for a recent piece about misperceptions of climate change, the first thing he emphasized was that climate is not weather. (Climate is basically average weather over time, over a large geographic area.)
Then Kelly excoriates those same unnamed journalists as the very people who for years told us that every “hot weather event” was proof of climate change.
Of course, lots of people, including some careless journalists, made cracks about global warming during heat waves. And of course they were wrong — just like Eve Ensler is wrong about tsunamis … and just like the people making Al Gore jokes when it snows in Washington are wrong that such weather disproves climate change now.
Snowfall in Washington, by the way, is entirely consistent with a warming planet. Here’s why. Snow requires two things: temperatures below freezing and moisture. The world, which is large and complex both atmospherically and hydrologically, is warming on average, but relatively slowly and fitfully, rather than at a steady, rapid pace planet-wide. So it’s still going to get below freezing sometimes. And a warmer planet means more moisture in the air. Thus, snow.
This is junior-high science stuff. Kelly and other climate-change deniers play on the fears and prejudices of people who imagine that somebody (maybe even nefarious “journalists”) told them that global warming meant that winter was going to vanish immediately. (On that matter, Kelly’s column also misquotes Robert F. Kennedy, claiming that in a 2008 column Kennedy asserted it would never snow again in Washington, D.C. Kennedy made no such claim.)
For context’s sake, it’s also worth noting that, according to NASA, the 20 warmest years on record have occurred since 1981, with 10 of the warmest years coming in the past 12 years alone. So apparently, although Kelly and his fellow deniers don’t view such long-term global evidence as evidence for climate change, one snowy winter east of the Mississippi is evidence against.
Some “deniers” are determined never to accept that climate change is real. But those of us who acknowledge its reality bear some responsibility, too, for not explaining the phenomenon better.
For too long, we’ve talked about climate change in terms of “belief,” i.e., “Jack Kelly doesn’t believe in climate change.” But the only belief that’s necessary involves the evidence found by eyes focused on rising thermometers, and on the melting Greenland ice sheet; the growing deserts in Africa and China; the disappearing glaciers in Alaska, the Rockies, the Andes and the Himalayas; and in the Arctic Ocean, where some predictions say summer sea ice — a phenomenon thousands of years old — could be gone in just a few years.
This article appears in Feb 11-17, 2010.
What I had read is that *almost* all of the Arctic summer ice could be gone in ten years. Al Gore made the mistake of saying all the Arctic ice could be gone in a few years, and the climate deniers jumped on him (metaphorically, have you seen how big he has gotten) about it. But make no mistake, especially after this winter and your (and other people’s) explanation for all the snow (ie increased water vapor), then *almost* all the Arctic summer ice melting sounds like an *almost* biblical disaster. Especially if the building people keep piling all the plowed snow in front of my garage.
I think we still face the most important question; what do we do about “Anthropogenic Global Warming”? The United States is (I believe) the biggest consumer of energy involved with greenhouse gases *per capita*. We need to make personal and national policy changes, but what sorts, exactly? Some changes, such as driving smaller cars more slowly, using energy efficient appliances including light bulbs and insulating our homes will save us money in the long run and should be easy choices (ha). But then there are other harder choices. Do we need cap and trade, and if so, how should it be designed? Do we need to consider nuclear, in addition to wind and solar? Should we let the market decide whether battery and/or hydrogen (fuel cell?) vehicles are viable, or should we subsidize or mandate a technology? Another complication is that although we may produce the most greenhouse gases individually, there are other countries who also produce greenhouse gases. How do we get them to cooperate, and what happens if any one of them decides it will reap the benefit of everyone else’s sacrifice, while making no sacrifice of its own.
The new questions are at best economic, and at worst *political*. The biggest fights may be just over the horizon. But thanks be to the divine being of your choice that Jack Kelly is here to guide us.
Ed
I think the best way the U.S. (as the biggest per capita consumer and the second-biggest absolute consumer) can influence what “other countries” do is to lead by example. This will involve everything from individual efforts to reduce emissions to state-level initiatives, but in the end federal action is needed if we’re to get the reductions at scale. I think cap and trade, however, is a weak solution that will make the “traders” lots of money but mightn’t bring emissions down that much.
Lately, though, I’ve been thinking not about individual policies but about the mindset out of which those policies grow. Until society has a fundamentally different relationship with nature — until we have an economics that prioritizes not raw “growth” but instead the health of the natural world on which our human economy depends utterly, for instance — I doubt we’re going to make many very good decisions about food and fuel or everything else. Such a change, of course, is probably a taller order still.
But thanks for reading and commenting.
Bill