Friday 3 May 2013

Americans: It's over when my invisible friend says so

This is the essence of the response by many Americans to climate change and efforts to forestall the human activity driving high CO2 levels set to reach 400ppm in coming decades, extreme and more frequent weather events, and a global climate expected to be 4-6°C(7-1F).

“[T]he fact that such an overwhelming percentage of Republican citizens profess a belief in the Second Coming (76 percent in 2006, according to our sample) suggests that governmental attempts to curb greenhouse emissions would encounter stiff resistance even if every Democrat in the country wanted to curb them,” Barker and Bearce wrote in their study, which will be published in the June issue of Political Science Quarterly.

Comments like "I don't think we can control what God controls" from a chair of the house committee on Science, Space and Technology; Paul Broun's "Evolution, Embryology, an the big bang theory are lies straight from the pit of hell" are outrageous and have no place in secular government, let alone science, which is the structured practise of reason in the endeavor of understanding the natural world.
A structure that now finds itself under attack in the Orwellianly titled "High Quality Research Act" which proposes to destroy the peer review and verification processes of the National Science foundation.
The Koch's could not buy enough scientists(much to the scientists' credit) to push their agenda, now if the Koch Brothers did come up with the HQRA, it must be a wet dream for them.

But the Koch's are not the only resistance, RawStory points to something I've known for a few years: the Christian religion is blinding some, too many, Americans to the facts and the need to act in our own best interest on climate change. Worse still, some of these people hold positions in which it is their responsibility to fix this problem. Those who live by the iron aged myths will die by the iron aged myths. Science has already pointed to the way to surviving our own pollution of the atmosphere. It is time to just get on with the job before it becomes the impossible task.

So between the corporate special interests and the credulous ignoramuses, will there ever be leadership in Washington to save America from greed and stupidity?

Perhaps not, and maybe we need don't them, 350.org has momentum encouraging disinvestment in fossil energy in the tertiary education sector. Their action is leading to increasing numbers of universities dropping carbon energy investments. Coal prices have fallen to around US$1/tonne. Coal companies are folding around the world, including New Zealand's Solid Energy.

I'm not asking for much from those who adhere to end times myths. Only the understanding that it is better to understand, respect and work with reality, than to have reality's consequences give you a bitch-slap. Just keep in mind: white water rafters who don't understand their environment don't go home.

No comments:

Post a Comment