This blog entry blew my mind a little bit.
A decade ago, I lived in Minnesota, and Paul Douglas was everywhere — easily the best-known meteorologist in the Minneapolis-St. Paul metro area. He never struck me as particularly political one way or the other — he was just the guy who told you how much snow you’d have to shovel off your car.
This week, he took a strong stand acknowledging the reality of global warming. Douglas writes (emphasis added):
I’m going to tell you something that my Republican friends are loath to admit out loud: climate change is real. I am a moderate Republican, fiscally conservative; a fan of small government, accountability, self-empowerment, and sound science. I am not a climate scientist. I’m a meteorologist, and the weather maps I’m staring at are making me uncomfortable…. To complicate matters, I’m in a small, frustrated and endangered minority: a Republican deeply concerned about the environmental sacrifices some are asking us to make to keep our economy powered-up, long-term.
Douglas, who also calls himself a “serial entrepreneur,” goes on to point out that he came to this conclusion over time. He began looking into climate science in the mid-1990s and, “along with 97% of published, peer-reviewed PhD’s,” he began to see the clear connection between rising levels of atmospheric carbon and a warmer, wetter atmosphere.
129,404 weather records in one year, nationwide? You can’t point to any one weather extreme and say “that’s climate change”. But a warmer, wetter atmosphere loads the dice, increasing the potential for historic spikes in temperature and more frequent and bizarre weather extremes.
He acknowledges the “very concerted, well-funded effort to spin climate science” that has led to decreasing belief that climate change is a problem that needs to be solved:
Some companies, institutes and think tanks are cherry-picking data, planting dubious seeds of doubt, arming professional deniers, scientists-for-hire and skeptical bloggers with the ammunition necessary to keep climate confusion alive. It’s the “you can’t prove smoking cigarettes causes lung cancer!” argument, times 100, with many of the same players.
After telling the story of how he got to this point, quoting John McCain, Schopenhauer, and the Bible along the way (the blog entry really is a great read), he ends on an optimistic note:
We can figure this out. Frankly, we won’t have a choice. But I’m a naïve optimist. We can reinvent America, leaving us more competitive in the 21st century, launching thousands of new, carbon-free energy companies — supplementing, and someday surpassing anything we can expeditiously suck out of the ground and burn, accelerating an already-warming planet. We won’t have to bury our heads in Saudi sand indefinitely — we’ll never “frack” our way to a sustainable future. It’s time for a New Energy Paradigm. There’s no silver bullet. But there’s plenty of (green) buckshot, if we aim high and point America in the right direction…. We need real leadership, and a viable, bipartisan blueprint for inevitable energy independence from President Obama and Congress. Yes, healthcare is important. So is the long-term health of our air, land and water.
Sounds like a plan to me… and a devastating indictment of the profit-makers who, devoted to the fossil fuel status quo, will say anything to deny reality.
