Nature Will Find a Way

Last week the Wall Street Journal's vaunted editorial page lashed out againt the doomsayer's who claim that global warming is real and largely caused by human pollution. Why they would waste ink and paper (valuable resources) to perpetrate its stubborn Luddite ignorance is unclear, except that it is probably that rag's unstoppable reflex to deride anything spoken by Al Gore. The editorial referred to two scientists who they claim refute the conclusions of the Evil Scientific Community. One of them has already responded that she said nothing of the kind, that global warming is real and terrifying and urgent. She also made reference to a scientist of yore who declaimed till his dying day against the concept of continental drift, long after it had been accepted by the establishment.

Okay, global warming is scary, and there may be an impulse to deny it because its ramifications are of literally global consequence on a scale way beyond our comprehension. But to avoid the obvious seems to be wildly wrongheaded and perhaps fatal to our species. Every day it seems more and more like we are existing within a familiar Science Fiction scenario, last popularized in the somewhat silly "Day After Tomorrow," in which the Vice President ignored the warnings of climatologist way after it was too late to act. In that movie, the Earth was plunged into a sudden Ice Age, so it can hardly be viewed as a docudrama for the near future. But Al Gore's movie "An Inconvenient Truth," and its follow-up by Tom Brokaw in a Discovery Channel special that reiterated Gore's findings, make a very compelling case for Global Warming as a residual effect of fossil fuel emanations and carbon dioxide emissions.

An even more compelling case is being made every day, outside, even as I write. The temperature outside in normally temperate Southern California is in the blistering 90s Fahrenheit. In the San Fernando Valley it has goine into triple digits regularly the past two weeks, leading to greater power usage and occasional brown and blackouts. (Just what the situation needs, more power consumption!) When a meterologist was asked if the continued heat wave was a result of global warming, the response was a very quizzical "No--it's the result of a large high pressure region centered mid-Continent." However, the meteorologist added, "Global warming is the real deal." This nonsensical non-denial denial, probably done for measured and political reasons, is like someone claiming that it's not swimming that gets you wet, it's the water in which you swim.

If there is a single statistic that clearly stands on its own, it's that twenty of the last twenty-one years have seen the highest mean world temperatures in recorded history. The one exception was probably the year that Mount Pinatubo spread some cooling clouds over the earth, dampening the heating effect. But twenty out of twenty-one is more than a random chance. And to cap it off, 2006 has been highest of them all.

On Saturday the temperature reached 119 degrees in Woodland Hills, a town just north of me in the San Fernando Valley. That was the highest recorded temperature ever in the Los Angeles region. I experienced some of it, as I attended a poker game over the hill and even at 7 P.M., exiting my car was like entering a very uncomfortable sauna at the gym. On top of that, traffic lights were malfunctioning all over because the power grid has been wildy oversapped. Oh, what fun. And I was reminded of that classic "Twilight Zone" episode when the Earth had lost its bearings and was heading toward the sun.

At the game, the subject of the weather naturally came up, and one wagster opined that it was silly to worry about global warming when World War III was about to overtake us thanks to the upheaval in Lebanon (or North Korean adventurism, take your pick). It struck me then that that might provide nature's perfect solution. If there is thermonuclear war, the nuclear winter--like a super Mount Pinatubo eruption--would instantly drop temperatures twenty-or-so degrees, totally neutralizing the effects of Global Warming. Ta-da! Everything will be fine again, except we will all be dead.

That wouldn't be so bad either; at least I'd be spared any more watching Arod continue to strike out with the bases loaded.