If I were a polar bear with access to media, I might be feeling slightly better about my chances of survival. The big guys are having a tough time, what with melting ice and all. So many have drowned trying to haul out on thinning ice sheets that no longer support their considerable weight.
Just catching seals is getting hard. Polar bears are good swimmers, but it’s exhausting work with the ice shrinking farther and farther away from their seal hunting grounds. And a population of their brown cousins in Europe appears to have stopped hibernating.
Anyhow, the president of our world has decided bears might be headed for extinction if polar ice keeps melting. For a long time he didn’t seem willing to accept the possibility that Earth is heating up, but in a speech to the nation he finally used the words global warming and said that in a year or so, polar bears might be placed on the endangered species list.
Then Laurie David e-mailed everyone who cares about such things to send a message to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service asking for public hearings on polar bear protection. It turns out the agency isn’t required by law to take public comment, but it may if enough people speak up. The deadline is Feb. 23.
David and author Bill McKibbon are organizing a nationwide rally April 14 to Stop Global Warming. Actually, it’s a whole bunch of small rallies put on by ordinary folks who care.
They planned this even before the world’s leading climate scientists met in Paris last week for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The panel’s last report, in 2001, said warming was “likely” caused by human activity. Teams of officials from 113 countries debated for three days over the wording “virtually certain,” which means 99 percent, finally settling on “very likely” or a 90 percent certainty. They predicted temperature rises of 2 to 11.5 degrees Fahrenheit by 2100, with sea level rises of 7 to 23 inches or more; 3 to 5 feet if melting of polar ice sheets continues at its present rate.
The science, challenged as late as last year by some in government, now is “rock solid, peer reviewed, consensus,” scientists said. After days of deliberation, the panel agreed on two contentious issues: that it is manmade and that it will produce an increase in stronger hurricanes.
So why has it taken so long to get real attention?
Well, naysayers like author Michael Crichton and Sen. Inhoffe, who called global warming the biggest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people, didn’t help.
Federal scientists, meanwhile, have reported pressure to play down global warming. Testifying at Sen. Barbara Boxer’s investigative hearing last week, they alleged White House officials “for years” have micromanaged the government’s climate programs and closely controlled what scientists “have been allowed to tell the public.” Rep. Henry Waxman said it “appears it may have been an orchestrated campaign to mislead the public about climate change.” A survey of 279 government climate scientists showed that many had felt political pressure to downplay the threat.
Forty-five nations have agreed to participate in France’s call for a new environmental body to slow the pace of global warming. The U.S., which is responsible for a quarter of the world’s CO2 emissions, declined, along with China and India. Former Vice President Al Gore responded to French President Jacques Chirac’s effort to stem the rapid pace of climate change, even though scientists predict it will continue for centuries.
“We are at a tipping point,” he said. “We must act and act swiftly. Such action requires international cooperation.”
Still there are those who would deny or politicize the science. The American Enterprise Institute is offering dissenters a challenge to poke holes in the panel’s findings.
For others it’s a religious issue. A Montana man protested a teacher’s plan to show Gore’s Oscar-nominated documentary, “An Inconvenient Truth.” He said he didn’t want his daughter to see the film because it conflicted with his religious belief that Earth’s warming, with the consequent drought, floods, extinction of species, is God’s plan for The Rapture.
In a 1963 lecture titled, “The Uncertainty of Values,” at the University of Washington (Seattle), physicist Richard P. Feynman discussed the conflict between science and religion.
Western civilization stands by two great heritages: Christian ethics and the scientific spirit of adventure, the attitude that all is uncertain . . . the humility of intellect.
“No government has the right to decide on the truth of scientific principles, nor to prescribe in any way the character of the questions investigated . . . Nor should it pronounce on the validity of economic, historic, religious or philosophical doctrines,” he said.
“It is not scientific to not understand what there is in the world in order to modify things; that is to be blind in order to maintain ignorance.”
Oh, Feynman, that’s it exactly. And it’s as true today as it was during the Cold War.