Global Warming

I watched the HBO Documentary on Global Warming entitled “Too Hot Not to Handle” and it seriously made me wonder about a number of things.

First of all it seems to me that the evidence is stark and undeniable that the earth is warming up. If nothing else the steady loss of snowpack in the western U.S. and the loss of glacier formations in Alaska make that pretty obvious even though there are a few folks, mostly far right wing types, that actually deny that any warming is occurring.

Ignoring the lunatic fringe for the moment, the question is why? The majority opinion is that this warming is directly related to human activities and especially the burning of fossil fuels. This is the conclusion of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change as well as the unanimous conclusion of the National Scientific Academies of the G8 nations which consists of Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom, the United States and Russia.

So why the hell won’t the Bush administration get off its butt and consider DOING something. The administration, despite discouragement by leading Republicans such as James Inhofe, the less than esteemed senator from Oklahoma, has grudgingly acknowledge at least that global warming is a potential problem. It just hasn’t bothered to do much about it beyond calling for more study and voluntary pollution cuts.

It’s having a senator like Inhofe that keeps Oklahoma in the race for least enlightened state along with front runner Kansas and perennial favorites Mississippi and Louisiana. Inhofe has called Global Warming the "greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people," claims it’s based upon fear rather than facts and that it’s more of a religion than a science used by extremist environmentalist groups as a fund raising ploy.

Inhofe feels that his argument has been bolstered by the fact that author Michael Crichton’s book Fear Factor, which debates that Global Warming is tied to human activity, made it to number three on the Best Seller list. Out of the mouth of babes, if there was any doubt that Inhofe is an idiot, the bit about Crichton’s book in a speech on the Senate floor in January of 2005 pretty much eliminated it.

The argument that what we’re seeing is simply part of a normal temperature cycle that has little or nothing to do with human activities is the favorite excuse to shrug our shoulders and say “well there’s nothing that can be done about it.”

The fear, of course, is that tackling the problem of the emission of hot house gases into the atmosphere is going to mean taking a whopping economic penalty. One of the most interesting points that the HBO program made was that ain’t necessarily so. Technologies such as hybrid cars, especially with gas prices ready to top $3 a gallon again, and solar power, if they’re not already, may soon be, a better cost bet than fossil fuels. So not only can we have cleaner air but a healthier economy also. Simply rendering ourselves immune to price fluctuations in foreign oil would go a long ways toward improving things.

Of course this might cut into the short term profits of the Bush family and friends so nothing gets done. I think it’s time to set a goal of being energy self sufficient within 10 years, 5 years if possible. If we could put together Tiger Teams to build the atomic bomb and get to the moon, we can certainly meet this goal.