ZeaLitY has an informal prohibition in place on political debates around here, on the grounds that they scare off new users. So I figured, why not post something political that is factually non-debatable? Aha! We have just such a thing in global warming, whose "bandwagon" has gotten a fair bit bigger now that NASA has climbed aboard. I present the following short essay for your information. Attention on deck!
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The truth isn’t always as conveniently obvious as a rising flood up to our necks. But sometimes it is. Take global warming, for instance. The very existence of this phenomenon was long a fierce scientific question with potentially serious ramifications for human society, and consequently fomented a tireless political debate that has only in recent years begun to peter out—not because conservatives, when finally faced with overwhelming evidence, were prepared to admit they were wrong, but because when the water is up to your neck it’s hard to argue with your head up your ass.
The scientific questions surrounding global warming continue. But what isn’t a question anymore is that global warming itself does indeed exist. Vast empirical evidence, in the form of observations of every kind, has proven at least this question beyond a reasonable doubt:
The Earth is warming up. And now that no less an institution than NASA
is behind this statement, following two major studies that the agency describes as the most comprehensive ever, the “global warming is a myth” myth will probably never recover. Instead we should expect to see conservatives focus more and more in the coming years on the argument that, yes, global warming is real, but that it is due to natural factors rather than smokestacks and tailpipes, and therefore should not affect our vaunted “free markets.”
That question has yet to be decisively answered in scientific circles. And conservatives, who often despise science, are going to exploit the absence of scientific certainty to the utmost, implying that their position is correct because it has not been disproved, just as they did with the issue of the mere existence of global warming. And the general public, for whom science is a vaguely unsettling cult practiced by bespectacled professors in white lab coats, won’t know the difference—nor would they be likely to care even if they did.
Nevertheless, something has been overlooked in all of this. Conservatives, in admitting that global warming is real, have implicitly conceded that there is indeed a problem to address. To a certain extent, it doesn’t matter if the problem is caused by humans or not. It will affect us all the same. We will have to adapt to our changing climates. Such a premise is the very antithesis of institutional inaction. We
have to change. Government policy and industry practice alike, we have to change. Our opportunity to reverse this warming, if such a chance ever existed within our means, is probably gone. So the liberals were right all along. And when the need for change “sinks” into the heads of the chief Neanderthals of our knuckle-dragging conservative brethren in Red America, the debate over action will finally become not “if,” but “how.” If only the truth were so conveniently obvious more often, as a rising flood.
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