WUI (Writing under the influence)

This guest editorial in today's Wall Street Journal written by Richard Lindzen, Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Atmospheric Science at MIT, made me think about a guy who often posts on Grovenet about all things that are wrong with the US, the Bush administration and us Americans. One of his biggest pet peeves is that most people are either oblivious or don't care about the so called man-made global warming.

The most recent Gallup poll (March, 2006) of Americans' attitudes on various environmental issues has revealed that there has been virtually no change in the last 17 years in the fraction of people worried about global warming. Only 36 percent of 1,000 adults polled in mid-March said that they worried a "great deal" about global warming. That increased to 62 percent when worrying by at least "a fair amount" was included. While this percentage is significantly higher than it was only two years ago (51 percent), it is lower than it has been in some previous years, with the peak number of worriers being 72 percent in 2000.

So he wrote recently:

My point is that, one of the reasons society chooses to ignore global warming, is trust. Who can a lay person believe? Do you listen to the scientists? Do you listen to Jerry Falwell or George Bush? Do you listen to Detroit, or do you listen to the leaders in California where this issue is so immediate? People don't know who is telling the truth and who is not, so they tune it out and they do nothing. Worse, they buy SUV's and consider their choice "a right". "Me first and get out of my way. The tree huggers don't want me to be happy. They want everything I've worked so hard for."

What rubbish!

I would say I would listen to scientists. The problem, as the editorial points out, is that scientist are people too, mostly employed by universities relaying on government grant money. To get the money for further research they have to come up with a good reason. The editorial also says that the honest scientists who dissent from the "consensus" view on global warming are bullied into silence or changing their views altogether. So I have to relay on common sense and history: I just can't imagine that we could change Earth's climate; the same scientists cried about global cooling only 30 years ago; the Sun, it seems, goes through cycles and it may be in one of those cycles that cause global warming right now. I would say: let's wait a few more decades before we destroy our economy in name of pseudo science.

But the guy on Grovenet is convinced that there is a war against the "consensus" scientists waged by the skeptics, deniers and, of course, the Bush administration, and that there is no more time left and we have to act. And he is ready to act:

If? There you go again. What will it take for you o act? At what point will you be convinced we have a problem? IS it not logical that, even if this is all a cruel joke, and we've tricked ourselves with the evidence, wouldn't it be prudent to start sooner rather than later just on the possibility this is for real? And if you knew anything about global warming you'd know the answer to the latter part of your question. If you appreciated the human animal, you would have some faith that, of course, human kind can do incredible things. We are amazingly resourceful once we accept we have a problem. But that's the problem: some of us still don't see that we have a problem. Do we wait for the slow kids in the class to get it? Do we respond in spite of them? Or, do we wait? Do you have children?

So a few days ago he started talking about buying solar panels to do his part to save the Earth.

I attended a work shop yesterday on Green Building and Renovations as they apply to global warming, and they told of a remarkable opportunity for businesses and home owners. Check this out!

You can buy a 3Khr photovoltaic panel along with the converter and a meter for about $24,000. That's a lot of money, but, guess what! After five or six years, you can own it and it won't have cost you a cent. And, it has a thirty to fifty year life, so it will be making electricity for you for a long time to come.

[...]

There is a large initial investment. It will take some patience and time to do all the paper work. Thus, this is not yet for everyone, but it may be for you and you and you. And rather than burning fossil fuel and putting tons of carbon in the atmosphere, you will be using a renewable source right on your own roof.

He sounded as excited as many people who got badly burned on some of those one-in-the-lifetime-now-or-never investment opportunities. Some people tried to explain to him that solar panels may not be cost-effective in this part of Oregon but he wouldn't listen and had only this to say after consulting with the solar panel salesman:

I don't know that these panels produce anything for people who voted for Bush.

I worry that like the scientists who are milking our government for more research grants, there are unscrupulous salesmen who will milk the true believers.