Year 3, Month 2, Day 8: What He Was Doing In My Pajamas, I’ll Never Know

The Tuscaloosa News runs an editorial stating that “Climate Change Should Influence Politics”:

Azaleas are budding and daffodils can be found in full bloom along rural roads around West Alabama. Is that proof of global warming?

Hardly, but that doesn’t mean evidence of sustained, rapid climate change isn’t mounting.

Consider this: Nine of the 10 warmest years in the past century have occurred since the year 2000, according to the NASA Earth Observatory. More of the Arctic Sea is melting.

And now the U.S. Department of Agriculture has changed the map that helps gardeners decide when to plant flowers and which will grow well here. Tuscaloosa, which used to be grouped with much of northern Alabama, now falls in the zone with Mobile.

Even all that isn’t conclusive proof of global warming. No, but the case for climate change has convinced more than 97 percent of scientists actively publishing studies in the field of climatology.

They agree that not only is climate change real, but the rapid rise in temperatures around the world over the past few decades is due to human activity.

Yep. Sent Feb 2:

At the moment, it seems as though science is just about the only element in American public discourse that doesn’t influence politics. Presidential candidates vie with one another for the approval of conservative religious groups, not to mention the various deficit-fixated, abortion-fixated, gay-marriage-fixated ideological factions which have dominated the national conversation for years. Meanwhile, Republican legislators are working overtime to reduce the amount of actual science taught in our country’s science classes, and to reduce the government’s funding of actual scientists who are carrying out research projects crucial to our country’s future.

But has there never been a Presidential “science debate” or anything more than the most anodyne public statements from the candidates about the value of science in our lives — and that’s a tragedy, for scientific method is by far the most accurate and comprehensive way to find out what’s actually happening in the real world — and policies that aren’t reality-based are guaranteed to fail.

And nowhere is this more crucial than in the issue of climate change. The scientific ignorance of our political culture is a disaster in the making.

Warren Senders