Year 2, Month 10, Day 27: Phlogiston?

The Miami Herald has an opinion piece by Fred Grimm. It’s shrill:

A sobering study released by Florida Atlantic University contemplated the effects of global warming in specific terms, particularly for South Florida, considered one of the more vulnerable metropolitan areas in the world, with six million residents clustered by the ocean, living barely above sea level.

The study from FAU’s Center for Urban and Environmental Solutions, adding to an overwhelming scientific consensus about the disastrous effects of global warming, and along with growing hard evidence that temperature changes are already altering the environment, ought to have sent tremors through the halls of government.

Except it didn’t. Perhaps the most peculiar phenomenon associated with global warming has been a burgeoning disdain for climate science even as scientific consensus grows more urgent. Forget the stickier question of whether global warming has been fueled by human activity (as an overwhelming percentage of climate scientists believe), a poll by the Pew last year found that only 59 percent of Americans will even acknowledge the earth is warming, compared to 79 percent just five years ago.

I’m busy; this letter is largely recycled material. Sent October 23:

Conservative zealots have politicized the public discussion of climate change, thereby turning science into an ideology. As with their many other adventures in regressive thinking, we will eventually hear them protest that, “nobody could have known…” Nobody could have known that dismissing warnings about Osama Bin Laden would be a bad idea, that an invasion based on fabricated evidence would turn out badly, that ignoring engineers’ warnings about levees would help to destroy a vibrant city — or that politicizing climate science would paralyze our nation in the face of the most serious threat humanity’s yet confronted. And the many of us who knew were mocked and derogated for our cries of warning.

Eventually, climate-change denial will be as dead as phlogiston and the medieval theory of humours. Unfortunately, by then all that “empirical evidence” will have submerged vast areas of land, crippled agriculture, and profoundly disrupted our civilization.

Warren Senders