Back during the Bill Clinton era, I sat through a number of 20/20 episodes, and along the way, became acquainted with a host named John and his “Give Me a Break” opinion segments. At the time I didn’t identify a particular pattern to those segments, but I would sometimes agree with the viewpoint expressed, and sometimes I wouldn’t agree.
Then, around the turn of the new millennium, ABC aired an hour-long special by Mr. S, during which he expounded on not 1 but 10 grievances. Somewhere along the way, between his suggestion that the 1970s DDT ban constituted self-disarmament in the war against malaria and his assertion that environmental regulations aren’t necessary because the air and water are just fine, and would be so even without such regulations, I concluded that going forward, i wouldn’t need to waste time giving serious consideration to anything he said. Though John obviously doesn’t know it, DDT, over 4 decades after the ban began, still causes harm to certain wildlife species, and may also negatively affect the health of humans who unknowingly come in contact with trace amounts. For an example of the fallacious reasoning behind the libertarian view of air and water pollution regulations, see Beijing, if you can.
So then, not so long ago, John reappears on the radar, in the form of a syndicated newspaper opinion column. This time around, Mr. S wants the climate scientists to give him a break. While John himself evidently hasn’t quite decided whether to believe in climate change (as if it’s some kind of article of faith), he’s quite sure there’s no cause for alarm, or even cause for lowering fossil fuel use.
While I’m no climate scientist either, I could tell John one thing — if, 50 years ago, when I was in HS, someone had told me that within my lifetime, there would come a point at which, during the northern hemisphere late summer, the Arctic Ocean would be completely devoid of ice, even if for only a short period of time, I wouldn’t have needed a climate scientist to tell me that such a change constitutes a really big deal. Yet, concurrent with Mr. S’s opinion piece, I also read such a prediction by a climatologist, who expects that this late summer iceless phenomenon could begin before the end of this decade.
During my HS years, one science teacher spoke about the concept of global warming as an ongoing topic of discussion and study for the scientific community, but one without definitive answers or conclusions back then. When I related this to a distant relative who I recently reconnected with on Facebook who also had attended the same school, he jokingly admitted that he hadn’t paid much attention in certain classes. Not long after, though, like a true climate-science denier, he asserted that carbon dioxide doesn’t trap heat from the sun in the atmosphere, to which I replied that from everything I knew, Tyndall’s work was still considered foundational in that regard, though if he had evidence to the contrary from some other valid source, I would certainly look it over. This reply of mine, unsurprisingly, got no reply from him.
In addition to learning about the possibility of global warming 50 years ago in HS, I also learned and understood the fundamental greenhouse-gas concept, which was settled science from a hundred years earlier, but my relative must not have paid much attention in class that day either. If you understand this piece of science, then it doesn’t take much to add in the possibility that oxidizing fossil fuel sources containing significant percentages of carbon could increase the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, which in turn would increase the greenhouse-gas effect — not all that different from adding 2 and 2 to get 4.
Before the late 1980s, the climate change discussion had no political element, but then some members of the Big Oil gang started blasting propaganda to confuse the issue, although, to the best of my knowledge, that only happened in this country, which explains why only in the U.S. does a sizable percentage of the population, mostly belonging to a certain political party, question the science of climate change. That propaganda continues, as evidenced by Mr. S’s opinion piece, although it also loses efficacy over time as the weight of the truth tips the scales.
Perhaps John should give all of us a break, and go back to school for a bit so he can learn some genuine science, but then, maybe that might be too scary for him, because the teacher might also belong to a union, which is another thing that bothers John a lot. Who knows, possibly Mr. S has himself suffered from some trace exposures to DDT that have blunted his reasoning capacity, in which case it would be pointless to try to explain to him a simple concept I learned in HS biology, which is that all living creatures on this earth share some basic chemistry, meaning that what’s poison to an insect is also poison to a human being, if ingested in a large enough quantity. I suspect that, just like my distant relative, John might have had better things to do in HS than listen to his teachers, but his ignorance of elemental science is no excuse, so when he asks us to give him a break, we can — a break from any sort of media credibility, since he shouldn’t have any.