In October of 2015 a Daily Kos writer asked what’s up with the climate burning while the Republicans fiddle on Benghazi. In 2024 Republican leaders are still too ignorant and/or corrupt to respond responsibly.
Part of the difficulty is that many elected officials are uneducated, fact-free, and deeply ideological. 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. 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 schmooze and booze and hang out with many eminent scientists.
An experienced mechanic can hear a car 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. One of my scientist friends has been studying the tropical corals for a lifetime.
Corals build giant structures, far surpassing Manhattan, Singapore, Tokyo and all those mega-heaps. But the actual living part of the coral is just a thin layer of microorganisms, sensitive to tiny changes in ocean temperatures and chemistry. The waste we dump into the atmosphere and oceans makes those changes and the corals are dying.
Shut up. Don’t argue. It is chemistry and physics. Fact, not opinion. Our profligate negligence is killing a gigantic fundamental part of the web of life we depend on. 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 gradually grow more threatening, and then 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 struggle in the downfall after our era of greed and purblind politics.
