So Daily Kos says log my blog and tell what’s what with the climate burning while the Republicans fiddle on Benghazi.
Part of the difficulty is that so many of the Representatives and Senators are so uneducated, so fact-free, so ideological without recourse to logic. The protocols of science just don’t make any sense to them. Worse yet, scientists tend to hold the sauce until all the evidence is al dente and fully colandered through peer review. It’s a problem when you actually do know the difference between opinion and established fact. This reticence plays into the strength of politicians, whose stock in trade is spouting opinions as if they were facts.
But scientists do have opinions, and sometimes if you stand close you will hear them. I live in the Galápagos Islands for most of the last fifty years, so I have been privileged to stand, walk, boat, scuba dive, schmooze and booze with many eminent scientists.
You know that an experienced mechanic can hear a car come in the driveway and pretty much know what’s wrong. An old farmer looks at the field and tells how many bushels of potatoes will come out of it this crop. One of my scientist friends has been studying the tropical corals for some fifty years.
Over thousands of years corals build giant structures, far surpassing Manhattan, Singapore, Tokyo and all them mega-heaps. But the actual living part of the coral is just a thin skin of microorganisms, sensitive to tiny changes in ocean temperatures and chemistry. The billions of tons of waste we dump into the atmosphere are making those changes and the corals are dying. Shut up. Don’t argue. It’s chemistry and physics. It’s fact, not opinion. Our profligate negligence is killing a gigantic fundamental part of the web of life. Corals are the oceans’ canary in the gold mine.
My friend the corals wonk has been tracking this stuff for decades. Like the mechanic, like the farmer, he can see the trend. The corals as a huge biomass tell us about enormous changes in the planetary synergy. My friend says the climate will really turn upside down around 2080. He and I will be among the grateful dead by then, but we sorrow for the generations who will suffer for our era of greed and purblind politics.