My Take On Global Warming

Damn this weather. After a couple of days of really pretty weather, we’re stuck in mad wind and blowing wet snow today. May was not meant for snow no matter what anyone tells you, and I for one am a big grump today because of it. Days like today make me dream of a warm beach and a cold drink. But the reality of my life means that despite being such an awesome blogger, I can’t just jet-set off to Belize whenever I like to escape the cold. I know, life’s weird, huh? But now I’m thinking of warmer, and that led me to warming, and I thought I’d weigh in on the topic.

I’m not a climatologist and wouldn’t have the first clue how to determine if the data is accurate or not. There’s a lot of math and science involved in interpreting the information that is simply beyond me. That’s why climatologists have to go to school. The collecting and interpreting of this information is a scientific process. In the same regard that I wouldn’t expect them to just pick up a computer and start building complicated web applications as laypeople, it’s equally silly to assume that I’d be able to pick up their data sets and determine what is true and what is not.

This is hardly a unique situation. We rely on experts who know their stuff to do the interpretation and give us the lay person’s view of their findings. We then have the ability to decide whether or not we feel there is merit to their findings (as best we can) and react accordingly.

In the case of climate change, it really boils down for me to one simple idea, and that is that polluting is stupid.

Whether you accept the idea that the polluting we’re doing is potentially going to heat the earth’s crust to the point that it causes massive environmental impacts or not, polluting is stupid. We know this because we’ve seen ample evidence that it causes us to become sick, it messes with the habitats of animals, and so many other examples. The more we rein in our polluting, the better we’ll be.

Energy in our current situation almost exclusively comes from burning stuff. That’s how cavemen did it, and that’s how we do it, and it’s simply an unsustainable model. We can make some changes by doing things like burning things that are less harmful like ethanol, and in the short term an increase in the amount of ethanol we use is part of the solution, as are hybrid cars and solar panels. But we need to be a little more active than that.

Of course, there are those who argue that people aren’t the cause of global warming. They argue that it’s a natural cycle, that it’s caused by other factors, and that the evil science types who came up with it are just liars. The good news is that everything has it’s detractors. There are those who will tell you that the earth is 6000 years old, that the earth is flat, and that we never landed on the moon. I guess this is a situation where having a detractor or two just goes to validate your work.

So let’s pretend for a minute that the climatologists are wrong. Let’s just say that we stopped polluting in general only to find out that the cause of global warming is root beer belches. Are we worse off? Yes, we invested money into alternative energy sources that could have been spent in other areas, but we still wound up with less crap in the air. Isn’t that worth the investment? We’re now less reliant on oil sources both domestic and foreign, is that a bad thing? The Western Canadian Sedimentary Basin is understood to be nearing the end of it’s life as an oil source, and that’s a situation that will have dramatic effects to our economy and potentially to our sovereignty. Getting away from that threat would be construed, at least to our humble blogger here, as a good thing.

So where’s the down side? Sadly, the only down side I’ve ever heard is money. It will cost us to develop the technologies necessary to better utilize solar and wind power. Now, maybe there’s some other really amazing down side I’m missing and if so then I look forward to hearing what it is. But from where I sit, admittedly as a layman, the only down side is that it’s going to cost us money to fix the problem. I’m afraid I just don’t see that being enough of a stumbling block to get in the way of all those benefits.

Doing nothing at best means we continue to pollute at our current level. There’s no way that we can construe that as a good thing, so let’s start doing something, a lot of somethings, and hopefully remove the threat entirely.

Jim