Changing Landscapes

It is April 12, and the snow drifts in our back yard are three feet deep. We haven’t seen sunshine in over a week, and instead of warming days and meltwater we have been getting additional snow. Still to come: Spring rains.

Global warming is indeed a hoax!

Last year we took a trip up to British Columbia, and on the way drove through 200 miles of smoke and fire. Our forest fires are routine now, starting in mid-July and going on into September. This year we’ll drive through Nevada with its parched mountains and barren landscapes. I wonder if that is Montana’s future.

Global warming is real!

But that’s just mental meandering – to take what I can see right in front of my nose and extrapolate. I’ve long been agnostic on climate change. I’m not a scientist, and don’t have access to the computers that parse all the data, nor would I know how to interpret the results. In the end, I have to take a leap of faith. So I have elected of my own free will to place that faith in the scientific consensus, and to believe that the planet is getting warmer, that humans are causing it, and that basic changes in the way we do business are in order.

Skepticism is natural and healthy, and there are those among us who look at the scientific consensus process as a form of herding. The scientific community will always congregate around the most recent and fashionable theories, which are often wrong. There’s been some of that, but what I’ve mostly witnessed with the global warming debate is not healthy skepticism. It is another and separate phenomenon. Global warming denial is not brought about by healthy and reasoned doubt, but rather by our public relations industry. They are our professional liars. They are very good at it.

It wasn’t that hard to do, in retrospect. This huge controversy came about because Exxon, seeing its business model threatened, consulted with people in the public relations industry. They saw right away that doubt was the key. Scientists (and Al Gore) were trying to raise public awareness of the problem. So Exxon planted a meme, or mind virus, to create doubt. Because people don’t like bad news and fear change, and because right wingers tend to see anything that is critical of the current state of affairs as an attack on capitalism, the meme took hold.

Exxon went so far as to offer bounties. They paid $10,000 a pop for papers that disputed UN studies on the subject. What is so remarkable though is not how evil and conspiratorial Exxon is, but rather how huge the payback has been for them. They’ve only invested a few million here and there – this from a company that makes $40 billion per year. There have been huge dividends. It seems that every self-respecting right winger is, concerning climate change, anti-science.

I read now that global temperatures haven’t increased in the last decade or so, and take heart. Maybe my grandchildren will get to see those massive Canadian glaciers after all. But scientists say that the Chinese and all their coal plants are putting so much particulate matter into the atmosphere that it is reflecting sunlight. The absence of additional warming is a temporary phenomenon, and it will resume in earnest in the near future.

I have no way of knowing. I yearn to be free of this burden, and want to believe that the problem has been overstated. But I am drawn back to the scientists and their data and their warnings. My sensible self says to pay them heed.

It’s discouraging to watch the public relations people ply their craft; to see how easily debates can be Swiftboated. We’ve made hardly any progress against climate change; we cannot even agree on the basics. Reputations of scientists have been impugned, science itself discredited. In the 1950’s right wingers saw that communists wanted to destroy capitalism. Now they say that terrorists living in caves scheme to do the same. And when they look at global warming, they are seeing people working to destroy their way of life.

It’s a conspiracy – one that spans continents and generations.

Anyway, our backyard drifts will melt soon enough, the rains will come and go and, like last year, a string of hot days will undo all of the snow and rain. The landscape will quickly turn brown and catch fire. Each year now several hundred thousand acres of our Montana landscape is permanently altered. We’re slowly becoming Nevada. That’s what my uneducated eyes tell me.