Of Crowbars and Perfect Fall Mornings

Blue sky through leaves, in a photo taken in Palo Alto, California, by yours truly in the fall of 2008.

On those days when your spot on the globe is favored by the whims of the atmosphere, it’s OK to enjoy the bright, beautiful morning outside your door. There is no moral requirement to taint it with the thought of manmade global warming. At my abode in coastal Rhode Island today, the sky is crystalline blue, there is the faintest of breezes, a few leaves are just starting to turn. The temperature: 55 degrees. Heaven!

It’s also OK to enjoy the next tremendous rainstorm that turns your street into a brook. There is no moral requirement to taint this temporary, exciting event with the thought of global warming, either.

Indeed, you are at perfect liberty to love – and marvel at – the atmosphere, as you did when you were an innocent child.

That’s what I’m doing this morning, and that’s what I plan to do for the rest of my life.

Perhaps it’s obvious that I and all others have the freedom to do just this? Not in the slightest!

For among the uncountable sins associated with global warming hysteria – making food needlessly expensive, making energy exorbitantly pricy, restricting the development of the Third World, squandering environmental cleanup funds on carbon dioxide abatement when there is actual environmental cleanup urgently needed – is that of putting a crowbar between billions of human beings and their sense of connectedness to nature.

This manufactured alienation may not seem to rank with the other listed problems, but it is because of it that all the others are possible. For once you convince the world’s citizens that they are living under a post-Nature atmosphere, convincing them to rewrite laws – no matter how misguided – to supposedly reestablish the natural order becomes a simple task.

That 95 percent of these people have essentially no knowledge of the atmosphere’s past characteristics and behavior makes the amount of leverage you need to apply to the crowbar minimal. Indeed, sufficient force for the task is as simple as this: Tell people that the 4.5-billion-year-old planet they’re living on has been warming, faintly, for 150 years. (Probably a good idea not to tell them about my book, or to allow their moment of climatological history to be put in perspective in any way  at all.)

Once again: you are at liberty to marvel at weather. And, honestly, I hope you will.