Global warming kinks removed

The great thing about science is that it has no unremovable dogmas. In science, everything can be challenged, and everything must be defended through vigorous reason and with strong evidence. It’s a bit of a shock for people who are raised in cultural traditions in which mere authority is allowed to determine the truth to find a discipline in which the only qualification for entry is adherence to a strict set of standards for the intellectual process. A intelligent child could do a valid scientific study and have the results published in a professional, peer-reviewed journal – it’s happened.

Still, unscrupulous politicians and lobbyists make great use of popular misunderstandings about science when it is in their best interest. They come up with “experts” who appear to have credentials and who will make isolated declarations about what they declare to be scientific truth – as if having a diploma from a graduate school has given them the authority to make scientific fatwas. Their work is rarely reviewed by their peers, much less replicated in well-designed experimental conditions. The nonsense of Intelligent Design Theology has been the most prominent, recent example of this problem.

To be fair, though, corporate lobbyists have also found some genuine missing elements in scientific theories and challenged scientists to explain the discrepancies or withdraw their theories. In the case of studies of global climate change, the number of these discrepancies has been reducing year by year, thanks to the troubleshooting of the petroleum industry, desperate to avoid any need to actually address its role in the climatological ruin of planet Earth.

The body of scientific evidence for global warming has been growing more and more airtight over the last 20 years. At present, the huge majority of scientists accept that there is strong and thorough evidence that global warming is happening and that global warming is most likely due to human activity such as air pollution.

Still, there has been one significant leak in global warming theory. Some satellite measurements of atmospheric temperature have indicated that there is, at some latitudes, a significant cooling instead of a significant warming. Corporate oil lobbyists and Republican anti-environmentalist activists have seized upon this discrepancy in their desperate defense of the outdated industrial model of energy in which we just burn up as much crude oil as we can to keep our civilization going.

The beauty of the scientific process is that scientists actually listened to the critiques of these lobbyists and Fox News pundits. They asked themselves if the critique could be valid. They looked at the numbers. They engaged in a professional examination of the data, which did indeed seem to point to significant patches of global cooling in the atmosphere.

The scientific process worked. This week, scientists announced that they had discovered the source of the discrepancy in the data on global warming temperatures. It appears that the satellite that had been taking atmospheric temperatures over all those years had drifted off course. As a result, as the years passed, what the satellite was recording as daytime temperatures were actually nighttime temperatures. Now, as everyone knows, the atmosphere cools off at night. So, the satellite was comparing old daytime temperatures with new nighttime temperatures. It is no wonder that the satellite data appeared to find global atmospheric cooling over time.

With the data corrected for the satellite’s drift over time, the observations are now shown to confirm global warming instead of to contradict it. So, thank you to all the corporate and Republican naysayers for pointing out this discrepancy. A critical examination of the issue has brought a greater understanding of global atmospheric measurements to the scientific community, and in the end, confirmed the very global warming theory that you were seeking to discredit.

If only these politicians and corporations were as willing to critically evaluate their positions as the scientists are, we would have cleaner air and a less powerful engine of global climate change. Still, they refuse to act. Still, the ask for more studies instead of allowing proposals for dealing with the problem to be considered.

More studies have been done, and continue to be released week by week. There is a mountain of studies on global warming. Just last week, for example, a newly-released study of the capital cities of Western Europe found that summer temperatures have undergone sharp increases over the last 30 years. In America, we’ve had the experience, with the most brutally hot summers all occuring in recorded history all taking place within the last decade. This summer will surely be added to that list, with devasting droughts combined with withering temperatures. In the northeast, I’ve observed sugar maples that usually begin to change their color in late September turning color now, in mid August, dropping their leaves because they’re running out of water to sustain them in the soil. Pumpkins planted for Halloween are already orange and waiting to be picked, thanks to the unusually hot weather.

It’s not just the corporations and politicians that are to blame. American consumers, in their lust for big machines that go vrooom, have increased the amount of carbon dioxide pollution they release into the air with their cars and SUVs – even as greater and greater depths of evidence of the problem of global warming has been found. As of 2003, carbon dioxide emissions from automobiles driven in America were 25 percent above the 1990 level – in spite of the addition of a small number of hybrid vehicles to the American automotive palette. The large gas guzzlers more than made up for the hybrids.

The scientists have done their work. Now it’s time for us to do our work. This isn’t about science fiction, and it isn’t some kind of frivolous effort to preserve habitat for backpackers. Global warming has already brought about huge numbers of deaths and vast amounts of damage to the world economy, and it’s going to get worse.

Thanks to the decades of Republicans telling us to wait, and wait, and wait for more scientific studies, and more evidence, it’s too late to stop the global warming, but can at least slow it down so that the destruction is less terrible. We, the little people, can start to conserve energy now. We don’t have to wait for the corporations and our Republican leaders to get clued in. We have the power.

Sell your SUV. Choose energy star appliances. Opt in to the green energy choices made available by your local utility. Plant a tree. Replace more of your lawn with shrubs and perennial alternatives. Ride a bike or walk to the store instead of driving, and if you live some place where sprawl has made that impossible, consider moving.

The very things that fight global warming are good for us as human beings too. They help us save money, they help us get in shape, and they make it easier for us to meet our neighbors. We cannot end global warming without generations of effort. It will take a concerted return to the traditional liberal American values of economy, simplicity, cleanliness and strong communities, but doesn’t that sound like a better way to live anyway?