Past and present: Reagan, the 2012 drought and the global warming debate

By Lee Cole–

“Approximately 80 percent of our air pollution stems from hydrocarbons released by vegetation, so let’s not go overboard in setting and enforcing tough emission standards from man-made sources.” – Ronald Reagan

There was a time in America when we trusted scientists. Science was not always met with distrust and skepticism, but then again, scientists didn’t start criticizing and evaluating industries and corporate endeavors until the end of the twentieth century. In fact for most of the industrial revolution, science was the handmaiden of industry, contributing to advances in technology that gave us the means to extract resources and maintain modern economies. Science is, of course, an umbrella term and something amorphous, including within it many disciplines and disparate interests. Of all these disciplines, none are perhaps distrusted more than climate scientists; only evolutionary biologists give them a run for their money.

In the 1960’s and 70’s, there was a real movement to change the way we treat the earth. Books like “Silent Spring” challenged the way we think about human impact on the environment. If we were ever approaching real solutions to the climate problem, it was during this era. Everything changed with Reagan, however.

Often touted as the greatest Republican president in recent memory, Reagan and his cohorts are most responsible for the current lack of trust we have for climate scientists. Doubting global warming wasn’t fashionable before the 80’s. It’s as if Reagan sat down with his advisors and said, “Ok, so we have to continue with our polluting industrial endeavors because it is making a lot of money for our friends, so we have to convince American’s that they have some reason to doubt it.”

The human brain is ill equipped for understanding processes occurring over vast timescales, like evolution or global warming. Because we can’t see it happening, from a human frame of reference, we are skeptical. We must restore our trust in the hard sciences or look to the evidence ourselves when it comes to disciplines and areas of expertise that the layman couldn’t hope to understand without advanced training. No one would expect an average Joe to grasp the mathematics involved in quantum mechanics or the equations behind the theory of gravity. Often our textbooks in high school provide us with caricatures and metaphors for these theories and implore us to trust that smarter people than us have an advanced understanding. With global warming, however, the effects are becoming more and more blatant.

This past summer, it rained in Mecca when it was 109 degrees Fahrenheit. One wonders if Ronald Reagan would’ve changed his mind about climate change if he could’ve seen the steam rising as near-boiling water pelted the streets there. Over half of the contiguous United States experienced moderate to extreme drought over the summer. Corn crops were barely salvageable, most of them used for silage.
The term “global warming” isn’t the best for describing what’s happening to the climate. That’s why in recent years, there has been a shift towards calling it “climate change.” While the global temperature has an overall rising trend, there will be some years in which summers are mild and winters extreme. Indeed, there will be some years when the seasons seem perfectly normal. But we can be sure that we will see extreme weather patterns, including deadly ones like tornadoes and hurricanes, more frequently.

Because we aren’t equipped to grasp the timescales involved in climate change, we pretend that nothing is happening and continue to pollute. We would rather make money now, extracting fossil fuels from the earth and selling them to the wealthiest nations and worry about how we’ve affected the climate later. We have no sense of moral responsibility for future generations.

There are really two senses in which we use the word “sustainable.” We can use it to mean long-term sustainability, such as when climate scientists tell us that using fossil fuels that cannot be replaced isn’t sustainable generally, as a long-term strategy. We can also use the word sustainable to refer not to environmental sustainability but to economic sustainability. Having summers as hot as the summer of 2012 is not economically sustainable, as food prices will continue to go up. This may be the only thing that will convince corporations and companies to adopt a more environmentally sound position. They cannot be swayed, after all, by melting ice caps, endangered species and rising temperatures. The only thing that might sway them is falling profits.

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Photo courtesy Wisconsindairyfarmer.com