Copenhagen--More Fun Than Real Work

Anyone who has lived as long as I have has seen the science on almost any major subject do a few back flips as new data is discovered and new theories promulgated. Science, like women’s fashion, goes in and out with its theories, like rising and falling skirts.
A few decades ago, the aging Einstein was seen by his colleagues as a sad case of a once brilliant physicist slipping into his dotage. Today his final pronouncements are seen as brilliantly prescient and very up to the minute science. Just wait fifty more years.
So it goes in the world of science. I often think that the brightest of us are barely precocious three-year-olds pottering around in a universe we cannot see to the end of—that was made by an ancient deity with an IQ measured in the trillions.
That’s why I’m not too excited about the big meeting in Copenhagen this past and coming week. They will entertain each other by reading erudite papers expounding this notion and that (half of which, I can PROMISE you, will be overturned by new “evidence” within decades)
Is the world getting hotter? Is all of this polar warming a precursor of an ice age? Are we doing it? Is it part of a normal global cycle—like earth quakes and hurricanes? The current fad is for scientists to believe that we’re heating up and my car and furnace are causing it.
“Tomorrow”, whenever it comes, we will perceive some new cause, some new dire consequence. We humans love to scare ourselves to death over some unprovable, future calamity that science has just discovered to our immensely enjoyable consternation.
It’s more fun to do this instead of becoming realistically concerned about the very likely consequences of, say, an Israeli airstrike on Iranian nuclear facilities, or a nuclear exchange between them. We talk and threaten that after New Year’s Day we are going to slap Iran with more sanctions (like those that kept Japan and Mussolini out of World War II). A few days at Copenhagen would be well spent coming up with some kind of solution to that situation.
How much will they talk about the vanishing oxygen generators on this planet? (We do kind of need the stuff.) We destroy crop lands to building housing with half acre lots—then we cut down trees and bushes all over the globe to replace the farmland.
Save a tree by recycling typing paper? How about saving a few hundred trees by building one less housing development each year, one less mall, one less parking lot? (Save oil, too, as people didn’t have to commute so far.)
How about the dead zones in our waterways? The one at the bottom or Lake Michigan where road salt has polluted the water (what was wrong with sand on an icy road—it doesn’t become slipperier than salt in really cold weather, either) or the one outside of New York harbor where they dumped garbage for so many years?
I live a few miles from a creek so polluted by industrial waste that kids on field trips itch badly after just putting their hands in it. The lake it flows into is beautiful—but not swimmable. It, in turn, flows into Lake Michigan from which Chicago, Milwaukee, Gary, Green Bay, Grand Rapids and lot of smaller communities get their drinking water. Believe me it’s not the only such lake along Lake Michigan, all pumping poison into one of the largest bodies of fresh water in the world.
That’s something for Copenhagen to really try to do something about. How about something real like serious planetary water shortages? The Aral Sea is basically gone—sucked dry by irrigation. Lake Victoria may be gone in 30 years, same reason. There’s talk of sucking dry the Great Lakes to meet the need for lawn watering in the South West. Here’s madness for Copenhagen to talk seriously about—we know human beings are doing this foolishness.
Ah, but the politics! Whose industry will be gored? What about waterways shared by different political entities. How do you talk a sovereign nation like Brazil into stopping slash cutting their forests? That’s hard work. Much easier to listen to papers on what my car may or may not be doing to sunlight every time I start it.
Copenhagen is easy. It’s much more fun than stuff we really, really need to do—NOW.