Heat

It’s been too hot to blog. The high temperatures and humidity make your Minor Heretic’s brain whimper and try to shrink back into its reptilian bottom third. We just had a top-5 heat wave here in Vermont, five days in the 90s, setting records. Ok, nothing to you folks in Arizona, but a lot of us haven’t invested in air conditioning.

This June, according to NASA, was the hottest since modern record keeping began in 1880. It followed the hottest January to June in recorded history, despite the sun being at the bottom of its cycle. 2009 was essentially tied with 1998, 2002, 2003, 2006 and 2007 as the second hottest year in recorded history. 2005 took the gold, if one can call it that, contributing to the first decade of this century being the warmest on record. According to the NOAA, this June caps 304 consecutive months that are as above the 20^th century average as the kids of Lake Wobegon. Oh, and the Arctic sea ice is at its lowest area for June (42%) since anybody has been keeping track.

I was thinking about ice the other day, and not just because it was disappearing from my drink so quickly. I went down to the Lake Champlain Maritime Museum and attended the opening of the new Hazlitt Small Boat Exhibit. The museum has built a place to display their collection of historic small water craft. At the center of the building is a fully rigged ice boat. It’s basically a big timber with a couple of outriggers on skates, with a mast and sail. Ice boats can easily exceed 60 mph with a stiff wind and smooth ice. If there is ice. While visiting the exhibit I listened to some people talking about their iceboating experiences. They used to sail out on the broad lake almost every winter. Now they mostly sail in the shallower bays. The broad lake doesn’t “close” with the consistency it used to. I looked up the National Weather Service records of Lake Champlain freezing over. It only missed two years in the 19^th century. It failed to ice over four times in the first half of the 20^th century and twenty-five times in the second half. Seventeen of those ice free winters occurred in the last 25 years.

As I noted a couple of years ago, the mythical Northwest Passage, pursued for centuries by unfortunate explorers, is no longer a myth. You can now take a summer boat ride from the Atlantic to the Pacific north of Canada.

I’ve been thinking about global warming of late, wondering how many record setting heat waves we’ll be enduring over the next decade. I’ve also been thinking about resistance to the concept of anthropogenic global warming (AGW). I suppose some people are just born skeptical, but it seems to be more than that.

Of course, employees of coal, oil, natural gas, power, and car companies have a vested interest in disbelief. As Sinclair Lewis once wrote, “It’s hard to convince a man of something if his salary depends on not being convinced of that thing.” Beyond sheer economic self-interest or profit motivated mendacity, there is a political divide. Global warming is “liberal.” I’d contend that geophysics is beyond politics, even though individual scientists have political beliefs. The whole structure of science is bent on correcting factual error and refining our understanding of the natural world. Nevertheless, it’s those lefty environmentalists who are yammering about it, so it must be wrong.

Some observers have noted that climate change has another political facet – the negation of conservative theories about the balance of the individual and the community. Dealing with climate change requires cooperative action and strong government intervention. The corporate fossil-fuel promoters won’t give up revenue voluntarily.

It’s frightening, too. It promises extreme weather, crop failures, submerged coastlines…cue the four horsemen.

There’s a deeper resistance, though, and it involves guilt and responsibility. If I accept the concept that human activity is causing a dangerous change in the climate, then I bear guilt. Every time I put the key in the ignition or hit the thermostat I am committing a little crime. Every day I do my bit part in the grand terracide of modern fossil-fueled life. When I get on an airplane, hell, it’s a gun to some island kid’s head. Who wants to think of themselves that way? Sure, in a way we are bounded by our infrastructure and the expectations of society. But still, we have some options. This is the responsibility part, because with knowledge comes responsibility. If you know you are culpable then basic ethics requires you to act. In this case, acting means going against the current of our society, dealing with change and inconvenience, and creating a new lifestyle. Dissonance and inconvenience are not hot tickets in our culture. Personal change, although celebrated in a thousand books, is more popular in print than in fact.

The biggest obstacle to people dealing with AGW is their desire to feel good about themselves and just get on with life. Especially as getting on with life has become more difficult of late. I get the feeling that a lot of people realize that the oil companies are bullshitting us about it, for obvious reasons. There’s still that emotional hurdle, though.

As always with humans, it’s a marketing problem. Make the economic opportunity pitch? Make it a sport? People love the human drama of athletic competition*, so why not carbon competition? There are a thousand ideas, but downplaying the guilt and the looming disaster is a start. It seems counterintuitive, but that’s us.

*Name that TV show