Global Warming

This is finals week, and I'm supposed to be studying, not blogging.

But I'm blogging tonight as part of my studying.

My blog is generally a quite frivolous endeavor. I don't really like talking about serious topics, especially politics. But tonight I'm going to talk about something to help me review the material for my final. It's something that is somehow a political issue, but it shouldn't be. Realize that I am not qualified to make a definitive argument, but I am entitled to my opinion.

As the title of this post suggests, the topic is global warming.

Somehow, Republicans all over the U.S. have become insistent that there is no global warming, or else that global warming is not caused by humans.

How the **** is this a political issue? Explain it to me.

I want to be clear that I am neither for nor against Republicans or Democrats. I'm a registered voter, but I'm unafilliated. Part of the reason for this is because people become so attached to their party lines that they throw common sense out the window. I have known some conservatives who deny climate change, even though they are otherwise very intelligent people. (Yes, I am insinuating something.) I think the only reason they deny it is because of their party afilliation. I have heard stories of scientists who were conservatives but they had to switch parties because they received too much ridicule for believing in climate change!

Here's where reviewing for my test comes in. The following is information we learned on Tuesday in my geology class:

The IPCC is an organization that summarizes research that has already been published. It consists of scientists from sundry relevant disciplines. A whopping 97.4% of publishing climate scientists think that human activity is a significant contributing factor to climate change. That doesn't prove that it is, but if 97.4% of doctors told you that you had a disease, you wouldn't want to listen to the 2.6% who said you didn't.

Climate change has occurred all throughout geologic history, but it has increased much faster than usual this time around. Our current concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is higher than it has been in the last 400,000 years. (We can learn about past climate through glacial ice cores.) It increased with the Industrial Revolution in 1750, and it has skyrocketed since 1959. Between 1959 and 2000, the CO2 level rose 174 times! (My notes aren't very good; I don't know if that means that the number of times it rose was 174, or if it rose by a factor of 174. I'm inclined to think it was a factor of 174.)

The year 2010 was the third warmest year on record. There have been changes in arctic ice, precipitation, and ocean salinity. The arctic is warming at twice the rate as other places. The difference between day and night temperatures has remained the same, but the temperatures themselves have risen.

I'm not saying you have to believe in climate change. But don't make it a political issue.

I can see why people would want to deny it. It can be comforting to say the problem doesn't exist. Oil and power companies don't want to lose money with the transition to cleaner forms of energy. You don't want to feel guilty when you drive your car.

I met a member on my mission who was the most stereotypically conservative person I have ever met. We took him with us to visit a member family, and somehow he turned the conversation into conservative politics. He said some very Islamophobic things. He also went into his anti-global-warming speech. He talked about how there was smog in California before there were any settlers--we humans have nothing to do with it.

!!?!

I'm sure there probably was smog then. But you can't tell me that all those millions of cars driving through California every day are good for the air. Would you leave your car running in a closed garage? I didn't think so.

It is so obvious to me that people like Brother ******** say that humans don't cause smog so that they don't feel guilty about driving their cars as much as they want. I acknowledge that I'm as guilty as anyone; when our January inversions pollute the Wasatch Front, I drive and I don't take the bus. But at least I feel guilty about it, and I don't try to say it's a completely natural occurrence.

So I've explained the motivations people might have to deny climate change.

But what if there really is no human-induced climate change--what would be the motivation to say there is evidence for it? Those scientists want us to make changes in our lives. They want to scare us. They want to see how gullible we are.

I just don't see the motivation to proclaim that we cause climate change unless there is evidence we really are causing it. It certainly isn't a comfortable or pleasant idea--why would we want to say there's a problem when there isn't one?

Suppose that there really is climate change, but we don't do anything about it. The sea levels rise, the ecosystems go crazy, and life as we know it changes forever.

But suppose that there is NOT climate change, but we do something about it. We diminish our dependence on fossil fuels, which won't last forever anyway. We develop new technologies and methods of providing energy. And everything stays the same. What would we lose?

Just some food for thought.