Editorial Comment

	Vol. 227 No. 10
PERRY A. FISCHER, EDITOR

A question of arrogance. Global warming is to writers as Bill Clinton was to late-night comedians. Here’s my take on how it works.

On the mythical Anti-Earth – that’s the planet that orbits opposite Earth on the other side of the Sun, so it can never be seen – everything is the opposite from what it is here, except human nature. On Anti-Earth, the problem is that a new ice age is approaching.

Almost all of the glaciers there have been growing for the past century or so, and the trend seems to be accelerating. There are pictures showing where the glaciers were a century ago, and video showing buildings slowly being crushed by the advancing ice. There are records of town meetings, where the subject was how soon and how far the town should be relocated, and these meetings continue to the present day. For a short while, the scientific consensus was not in doubt – the advancing ice seemed obvious enough – and yet, somehow, controversy arose.

The media were skilled at doing their jobs of creating controversy. Like lawyers who always seem to find an expert who will testify that DNA is fake, fingerprints are often alike, and evolution is a scientific sham, editors and reporters intentionally sought out those few scientists who honestly believed that the ice ages never happened. There were even a few papers published to that effect. The story was presented to the public in a greatly oversimplified manner, condensed and reported as a controversy. The public, being untrained in science, like a lay jury, and not particularly disposed to investing a lot of time in the matter, was repeatedly presented with a 50/50 proposition of opposing experts. In time, whether there was even one ice age became a matter of debate.

Politicians and their advisors were keen to seize on the controversy, each choosing a side and pushing it hard; each saying that if the other side gets its way, civilization would be in peril. Much of the energy of Anti-Earth came from hydropower, and there was genuine fear that, over time, the water would freeze when it was needed most to keep warm.

Large-scale solutions were proposed by various groups with obvious self-interests, such as burning enormous amounts of carbon-based fuels to increase atmospheric CO₂ and forestall the advancing glaciers. Another group wanted to put huge arrays of ultra-light aluminum foil in space, to reflect more sunlight into the high latitudes, thereby extending the daylight and warming the atmosphere. Farmers proposed growing and fermenting vast quantities of plant matter and releasing the CO₂ into the atmosphere. Each industry – coal, oil, aerospace, agriculture and so on – lobbied the politicians hard and paid them well, in an effort to secure their financial future through political payola of public monies.

The scientific politicos would not be left out; they had partisan favorites, too. The Geological Professional Association of Anti-Earth (GPAA), previously a scientific society, decided to give a Journalism Award to the famous novelist, Michelle Chitin, for a work of fiction, much to the amazement of some of its members. Ms. Chitin’s novel, State of Complacency, is about a global conspiracy of far-right conservative realtors with a simple, yet diabolical plan: Convince people that the glaciers were not advancing, that the pictures of buildings being crushed by advancing ice were part of a left-wing conspiracy, and that ice ages were not a proven fact. In short, there’s nothing to worry about.

Meanwhile, the savvy, evil realtors began quietly buying up all the prime real estate around the Gulf Coast, the Caribbean and the Mediterranean – in short, wherever it’s warm. While fictional, the book’s theme is that there is an actual, ongoing conspiracy in the real world. It cites several one-off examples and studies from the same scientists that said the ice ages are an unproven concept, that the glaciers are actually retreating, and that it could begin to get warmer soon.

Oddly, Ms. Chitin was trained in medicine and, as any doctor should know, you don’t recommend that your patients adopt a diet rich in coffee and chocolates just because there’s a study that says it’s good for you. Medical science, like global cooling, requires many studies. They rarely ever all point to the same conclusion, and it takes a “preponderance of evidence” to arrive at a consensus recommendation.

Besides politics and books, there was a religious overtone injected into the whole mess. The pious and even the half-hearted, who would sometimes admit there sure seemed to be a lot of ice around, and that it was advancing, did not feel comfortable doing anything grandiose, like changing the atmosphere or the amount of sunlight. The basic feeling was that it was in God’s hands, and it was arrogant to tread on His territory, let alone think Man could actually effect a planet-wide change.

The conservative futurists were caught in their own ideological dilemma. Always staunch environmentalists, they wanted to preserve the “natural” status quo of Anti-Earth, no matter what it required. On the one hand, Anti-Earth was well along in its plans to colonize Mars, with far-reaching plans for some future generation to terraform the red planet, changing its basic atmospheric makeup. Changing that planet’s climate was certainly not natural, but would it be the right thing to do?

Whether on Mars, Anti-Earth or Earth, should humans have the right to change a planet’s processes for their own needs? It’s one of the subtexts behind today’s debate that is never discussed; often the silent crux of the argument. For many, it’s comforting to leave it in God’s hands; doing nothing is the right thing to do.

What’s my take on global warming? I don’t know enough to take issue with 11 National Academies of Science. I only have a lowly BSc in physics, a year or so in geology and two meteorology courses. In other words, woefully unqualified to argue with so many who have worked so long. And I don’t believe in vast conspiracies.

I do not care if a planet’s atmosphere is changing due to human activity, a mix of natural and man-made, or even purely natural processes. The degree of naturalness of calamity does not comfort me. It’s like asking whether you prefer a natural or unnatural death. I would ask for a third option.

We should deflect all asteroids that threaten to impact Earth; we should predict and, when possible, mitigate all earthquakes and tsunamis. Numerous extinctions of most of the life on Earth have occurred in the past – we should strive to understand and prevent the next one. We have reached the point in our evolution, where we have but little choice to act, however cautiously, on the best information that we have, even though the future might prove us wrong. If that’s arrogance, so be it.