Year 3, Month 4, Day 28: Hot Air Jokes Aside, What’s Wrong With This Picture?

Popular Mechanics covers the “People are waking up” by running a short interview with Gavin Schmidt, a NASA climatologist. It’s worth reading the whole thing:

Yesterday The New York Times covered a new poll showing that an increasing number of Americans are linking the extreme weather events of the past few years—including the extremely warm March 2012, droughts, and hurricanes—to climate change. We asked Gavin Schmidt, a climate researcher at NASA’s Goddard Institute and a member of PM’s Editorial Board of Advisers, why he thinks this shift is happening, and if it means that policy changes could be on the horizon.

Q: What’s your first reaction to these polling numbers?

A: I am not really surprised. Most people don’t have a very sophisticated grasp of what climate change is, which is completely understandable. But people do have a visceral connection to weather; they talk about it, understand it, and they’re very fond of extremes in weather (in a conversational way.)

Since it was Popular Mechanics, I figured a mechanical analogy would do the trick. Let’s see. Sent April 19:

While it’s good to know that increasing numbers of Americans are connecting the dots between extreme weather and global climate change, it’s unrealistic to expect that the shifting winds of public opinion will lead to changes in our country’s energy and environmental policies.

Why? The answer can be expressed in simple analogical terms.

Policy development in the USA is driven not by public opinion, but by private cash — the vast sums of money required by political campaigns motivate lawmakers far more powerfully than any number of concerned constituents. Unlike cutting-edge hybrid and electric automobiles, our politicians are almost entirely fueled by petroleum. If we as citizens want our nation’s policies to reflect environmental reality and address the climate crisis with the requisite seriousness, it’s not just our technology that needs to change, but the political system that has made a robust response to the climate crisis impossible.

Warren Senders