Dear Red States and Global Warming Deniers, 11-16-2020
The election map is alarming. Anti-science, anti-Democracy, anti-intellectual attitudes are alarming. Even though he still won’t admit it, Trump lost the election, but not by much…not by nearly enough. How is it that roughly 50% of the U.S. population still supports Trump with all his ignorance and corruption? How is it that the nation that has led the way for freedom and democracy in the world since 1776 has become so supportive of a dictator? Perhaps most puzzling, how has the nation that spearheaded the environmental movement spawned such radical anti-environment, anti-science agendas? How have Climate Change deniers grown so powerful that they have locked up the entire Republican Party? The National Forest system, the Endangered Species Act, the Clean Water Act, the Clean Air Act, the Federal Lands and Policy Management Act - all created and/or signed by Republican presidents. The modern Republican Party has forsaken its past and all of its traditional values (moral values, fiscal responsibility values, environmental values).
We must support environmental protections and efforts to combat Global Warming/Climate Change - these are the existential threats to our society and the great challenge of our time. When I moved to Lewistown, Montana in 2007, it surprised me how aggressively some people expressed anti-liberal, anti-environmental, and anti-Democrat views. I'd never lived in such a conservative place or encountered so many aggressively conservative colleagues. I had experienced these attitudes to some degree in Colorado, where I had lived from 1992-2007, and had only argued with a single colleague (~2006) about Global Warming (he was one of the first people I encountered who expressed the view that Global Warming was a "liberal media hoax"), but in Lewistown there was a difference - an intensity, a seething hatred toward anything environmental, liberal, and Democrat that I hadn't encountered before.
In the last 15 years, I've lived in some of the most conservative places in the U.S. - rural MT, rural WY, rural eastern CA/western NV, northern UT, and now AK - and I have to say, the anti-science sentiment in these places is alarming. For context, the anti-science mindset has a robust tradition in many branches of Christian institutions (Galileo was persecuted by the Catholic Church for expressing his views that the Earth revolves around the Sun, rather than the Earth-as-center-of-the-universe, as was believed by the Church at the time…it took the Church over 350 years to issue an apology and formally acknowledge that they had been wrong) and interestingly enough, organized fundamental religion is more dominant in all of these rural communities and northern Utah than in the larger cities where I’ve lived; much of the anti-science, anti-intellectual attitudes that I’ve encountered come from people who grew up under heavy, fundamental religious culture and influence.
Another social force that is more dominant in rural communities than in urban areas is AM talk radio. I spent significant time listening to Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity and started to understand why I was experiencing so much hatred from many of my colleagues - the apparent primary goal of these talk radio hosts is to incite hatred toward anything environmental, liberal, and Democrat. They are very clever, manipulative personalities and they have indoctrinated a good number of intelligent, rural Americans with very misleading, and often downright false information. With the prevalence of fundamental religion and ultra-conservative AM talk radio throughout the rural heartland of America, it’s no wonder that all of these regions are “Red States” that oppose environmental regulations, oppose social justice, oppose immigration, oppose “social” healthcare (even though many rural populations live highly socialized lives already - ranchers, farmers, and extractive industries rely heavily on government subsidies and resources cheaply available on federal and state public lands to be financially viable operations). These personalities demonize big government, liberals, Democrats, and environmentalists in favor of unregulated free market capitalism and a false perception of rugged individuality and personal freedom. Given that context, it’s not surprising that they would seek to minimize or deny Global Warming and its impacts.
In the context of the scientific community, however, Global Warming is very real and very threatening: human-caused Global Warming was first predicted in the late 1800s; it was first demonstrably measured in the late 1930s; it was widely accepted by the late 1980s (it was already in my high school text books by then); and it's growing effects have been increasingly studied, measured, demonstrated, witnessed, experienced, and predicted since the early 1990s. Nowhere is it more readily apparent than here in AK, which is warming much faster than lower latitudes. And yet, many people here still refuse to believe it.
The question is “Why”? Why are we - as a society - still debating whether Global Warming is real and what's causing it?
There is no debate in the scientific community - Global Warming is real and humans are causing it. We call it Climate Change now as a euphamism to make it more palatable to wider audiences.
The specific mechanism causing Global Warming is massive accumulation of CO2, methane, and other "greenhouse gases" in Earth's atmosphere...this accumulation of greenhouse gases is a direct result of human-induced combustion of fossil fuels around the world, both from point sources (large-scale outputs from single sources like big power plants and other industrial applications) and a multitude of non-point sources (like 100's of millions of cars, trucks, and heavy equipment).
There’s a video on YouTube by Peter Temple ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IKmz7OGcyzU ) which takes a few core facts about the Earth’s climate over the last 11,000 years and grossly misrepresents what they mean. He also claims that 11,000 years is "the big picture", but 11,000 years definitively is not the big picture - it's a blip of time in the history of the Earth, our atmosphere, and our Solar System - which is roughly 4.5 billion years old.
Here are a few of Temple’s claims that seek to mislead, or are outright false:
1. "the Sun is cooling" - ultimately, this is a true statement; in fact all celestial bodies in our solar system, including the Earth, are cooling, but very gradually - on the order of billions of years gradual. This cooling is not something that's affecting Earth's climate in human-lifetime perspectives or time scales (the Sun is estimated to be about 4.6 billion years old, and should last another 5 billion years before it enters its "red giant" phase which is an enlarging and more rapidly cooling phase); Temple's statement is very misleading, as he expects the viewer to conflate two ideas that independently are true, but have no cause-effect relationship...i.e. if the sun is cooling, that must mean that the Earth's climate is also cooling - which brings me to point # 2:
2. "the Earth's climate is cooling" - this is just plain false; every scientific metric demonstrates a clear trend in global temperatures rising; when I say "global temperatures", I'm referring to average temperatures of soils, oceans, and atmosphere. Part of the confusion for some people about Global Warming, is that local cooling periods can still be observed for short periods of time (season-scale or even a few years)...but taken as a whole, all land masses and oceans on earth are getting warmer along with our atmosphere, even though local variations can and do happen for relatively short periods of time. Here in Alaska, a clear example is permafrost warming (National Geographic - “Permafrost temperatures globally have been rising for half a century. On Alaska's North Slope, they spiked 11 degrees Fahrenheit in 30 years”).
One of the early predictions of Global Warming was that weather patterns would become irregular, in some cases erratic, and temperature- and storm-cycles would become more extreme. We are witnessing, and have been witnessing these phenomena for at least two decades now, maybe three (think about the hurricanes, flooding, and wildfire events of recent memory). When we experience the extreme end of things on the cooler side (think of snowfall events in southern latitudes of recent memory), it's hard for some folks to understand that these events are still related to Global Warming, but that they don't represent a larger cooling trend.
3. I'm not sure about Temple's interpretation of the "NOAA" chart he uses in the video - I couldn't find the chart on the NOAA website to analyze it myself, but please take a look at the NOAA webpage on Paleoclimatology, there's lots of great data there:
4. Temple refers to Greenland Ice Cores and when we look at those cores - and even older ones from Antarctica (we have ice cores from Antarctica dating back 800,000 years which blows away Temple's 11,000-year analysis) - we see that both the Greenland and the Antarctic ice cores indicate an unprecedented rise in CO2 levels in the Earth's atmosphere - this is one of the main reasons we know the current trend in Global Warming is human-caused...Temple is correct about cyclical fluctuations in Earth's climate, but he's incorrectly conflating those cycles with his erroneous analysis of a current cooling trend (really a warming trend) and doing so by ignoring the overwhelming evidence that the current trend is human caused. Ice cores are just one portion of the body of evidence that demonstrates Global Warming - ancient corals, sediments, pollens/fossils, and tree rings also contribute to this body of evidence).
5. Temple claims that nobody else (but him?) is looking at the past...quite the contrary, scientists studying Climate Change are obsessed with past climatological conditions; they are aware of the same cycles that Temple describes; the problem is with Temple's deeply flawed analysis and conclusions based on a superficial look at these cycles, and a failure to look farther back than 11,000 years.
6. Temple's final statements about politicians trying to "tax it [energy production] out of existence" reveal the true intent of the video: to spread lies and propaganda on behalf of the oil industry - classic Koch brothers tactics. The Koch brothers and other oil magnates understand that if they can convince enough people that Global Warming isn't happening, they can continue raking in the money, making themselves even more obscenely wealthy, at the expense of the environment.
I have to acknowledge that my life is just as dependent on fossil fuels as everyone else's, and as such, I support responsible oil development while we transition to renewable energy sources and more efficient use of fossil fuels; the point is that we need to get much more aggressive about developing renewable energy sources and reducing our carbon footprint - Global Warming/Climate Change is an existential threat to life as we know it. However, this idea threatens big oil - any decrease in demand for oil could mean big losses for those big oil corporations and wealthy individuals; unless of course they do what British Petroleum has been doing for 20 years already and start investing heavily in alternative energy production.
However we produce our energy, there will always be tons of jobs for people, and opportunities to get rich, so staying stuck in fossil-fuel-only mode is just silly, and profoundly harms the environment unnecessarily - there are other ways to produce energy, better ways, more sustainable ways.
For our kids’ and grandkids' sakes, please make the right decisions today - stop listening to and propagating dishonest and harmful information about Global Warming/Climate Change; when we propagate this information, we're schilling for big oil billionaires at our own expense, it turns us into their operatives, their pawns; they don't care about us or our kids or grandkids, so why would we spread their propaganda? In fact, they know full well that Global Warming is happening and that it's human-caused; they're simply banking on being so rich and powerful that they'll be able to ride out the environmental disasters and social collapses better than the rest of us.
Check out this Bloomberg Business video released in 2015 to get a good summary of the real story about Global Warming:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=McRYTC56DC4&t=46s
Think globally, act locally.
Sincerely,
Adam Babcock