Global Warming--The Profit Imperative

Today gave us the kind of morning that could almost make one lose his faith in Global Warming. It didn’t get above 17 in West Michigan. The county gave up and called the plows off the road. The sheriffs up and down the coast recommended that people not drive. And now we have a blizzard.
It was 37 in Austin, TX, where one in-law lives. It was 39 where another one lives near San Jose, CA. Chicago land was reporting in at six below—and Seattle was all but shut down with a rare blizzard. We haven’t experienced a December like this one in West Michigan for about fifty years.
It could almost make some people dismiss all the talk about “global warming”. Cold blasts like these may actually signify the kind of weather that precedes an ice age. The best guess scientists can give us on previous ice ages is that this is how they began: warmer in the arctic, snowier down below.
Many scientists suggest that symptoms of Global Warming tend more toward erratic weather patterns than to any straight line warming trend. This morning, we’re seeing erratic. Over the past few years, we’ve seen drought, we’ve seen floods, we’ve seen hurricanes and tornadoes – in short, we’ve seen just about every kind of weather pattern you can ask for.
But, the brutal fact is—and I’m not putting my head in the sand and insisting that nothing is happening —nobody really knows. Nobody really knows what’s happening or why. There’s a great hue and cry that it’s all due to our “carbon footprint”. Stop driving, prevent bovine flatulence, don’t burn coal—and it will all go away.
Will it? Has anyone proved that? Has anyone done some serious scientific research and observation—say, on the scale of the Manhattan Project—to figure out what is really happening? And what might really prevent it? Or might we find out that what’s happening is cyclical—a cycle that occurs over a very long period of time? That, God help us, it’s a normal planetary pattern?
After all, we have only been keeping accurate records of our weather patterns for a century or two. No one has any records that date back 10,000 years, let alone a million or two.
Some scientists seriously suggest that if the arctic seas continue to warm so that arctic waters spill out into the Atlantic, Europe might be rendered incapable of sustaining human life within a decade or two. Imagine that such a thing might possibly be true. How close might we be to the tipping point?
Wouldn’t this be worth some serious evaluation? Would a rational race of beings do anything but devote all its energies—not toward one quick, unproven panacea like eliminating fossil fuels but to a study of what is actually happening? How about drilling core samples all over the planet—cost be hanged—to see if and when this happened before and what caused it.
Such a study might give us some solid, data-based clues as to what we actually faced and what we might possibly do about it. What if there’s nothing we can do? Then the expenditures might go toward moving vast human populations to regions further south. Et cetera, et cetera.
But we haven’t done that. We won’t do it. Why not? I got an insight into “why not” when I was an undergraduate in college. They made me take a physical science course so that, a history and English majors, I might become more well rounded. I found the course tedious until … .
One day the instructor began talking about the properties of electricity—and all the clever things it can DO. That’s not how my mind works. I immediately raised my hand. When recognized, I asked, “What IS electricity?”
“No one knows”, answered the professor. He smiled benignly and went on with his lecture. I was stunned. We play with the stuff, we make it stand up and do tricks—but we have no idea what it actually is. My unscientific mind wants to know: if we spent a few billion doing nothing but finding out what the stuff is, might not we save far more billions discovering how to generate it more easily and safely, and figuring out how to store it and transport it more efficiently?
But that would be like wasting money learning what is actually causing our freakish weather patterns –and how we might deal with it as a known quantity. There’s no obvious or immediate money in it. You cannot draw up a neat little chart that will show a corporate board—or a Congressional committee--exactly how much money they will get back or when.
Companies and governments tend not to spend money on research that doesn’t offer an immediate payoff. (Even if their lives may be at stake.) No, the Financial—or Profit—Imperative keeps us from wasting our time on what we sneeringly dismiss as knowledge merely for knowledge’s sake.
No use trying to explain that such knowledge just might give us some vitally needed answers. It can’t be justified on the bottom line.
We will go on babbling—as if we knew precisely what we were doing—about Greening ourselves, cutting back our carbon footprint, with no idea if that’s actually the problem, or if any such actions will necessarily cure the problem. We’re not even sure, as I sit here, what the problem is.
No matter. It’s very human to rush around DOING SOMETHING or at least talking about doing it. Whether it’s a sensible thing—or even a helpful thing to do—doesn’t really matter. We’re in motion; a handful of us are buying hybrid cars, we’re recycling a few more cans. See? We’re all helping.
Couldn’t we spend a tiny fraction of the “bailout” figuring out what’s really going on?