Month 2, Day 26: Bill McKibben Speaks For Me

Daily Kos diarist A Siegel directed my attention to Bill McKibben’s piece in the LA Times, which included a telling analogy (and one particularly suited to the Los Angeles audience:

The “dream team” of lawyers assembled for Simpson’s defense had a problem: The evidence against their client was formidable. Nicole Brown Simpson’s blood was all over his socks, and that was just the beginning. So Johnnie Cochran, Robert Shapiro, Alan Dershowitz, F. Lee Bailey, Robert Kardashian et al decided to attack the process, arguing that it put Simpson’s guilt in doubt — and doubt, of course, was all they needed. Hence, those days of cross-examination about exactly how Dennis Fung had transported blood samples and which racial slurs LAPD Det. Mark Fuhrman had used.

(snip)

Similarly, the immense pile of evidence now proving the science of global warming beyond any reasonable doubt is in some ways a great boon for those who deny that the biggest problem we’ve ever faced is actually a problem at all. If you have a three-page report, it won’t be overwhelming, but it’s also unlikely to have many mistakes. Three thousand pages (the length of the latest report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change)? That pretty much guarantees you’ll get some things wrong.

The whole piece is terrific; like all of McKibben’s writing, it is a model of clarity and logic. So I thought I’d send the LA Times a letter, reinforcing his words. Here you go:

Bill McKibben’s comparison of climate “skeptics” to the O.J. Simpson defense team is spot on. These corporate-funded denialists exploit our tragically short national attention span in order to delay or derail meaningful action on global climate change. How do they do it? By shrieking about ambiguities in the data while ignoring the overwhelming evidence that same data provides. Why do they do it? Because they’re paid.

Climatologists have long forecast that local weather will get weirder and more unpredictable as the atmosphere warms. It’s counterintuitive that planetary warming can bring unexpected snow — but it’s also counterintuitive that a starving child’s belly swells. Regardless of its importance to our politics, Washington, DC takes up a tiny fraction of the world’s surface area — 1/285,507th, to be exact. Kwashiorkor doesn’t disprove world hunger; a blizzard in Washington doesn’t disprove global warming. We must move boldly to address the climate crisis. There is no time to waste.

Warren Senders