Gardener

In my last Plumbline I told some stories about people I had encountered who were adamantly opposed to the very notion of global warming and human involvement in it. In each case the reasons were pretty superficial or even ridiculous. Today I want to try to express as fairly as I can the serious reasons people give for being indifferent to global warming. I want to be fair to them, but I also will try to refute those reasons. As I listen to and read the arguments of those opposed to the idea of human involvement in global warming, I encounter two main arguments, one has to do with science and the other with business and lifestyle. First, the area of business and lifestyle. For those who have a strong commitment to capitalism, the “free” market system, and the lifestyle that we associate with this system, a war against CO2 emissions will be perceived negatively. Why? Because, they say, it will have a negative effect on American business. That’s why organizations like the American Enterpr...

I spent February of this year in Florida, hanging around with old folks most of the time—after all, I am 67 and an official member of AARP. One of the things I was told by an elderly acquaintance in Florida was that the whole idea of global warming had come from an 8th grader’s term paper. And he believed it. I asked him if he ever watched NASA launch spacecraft to go to the space station—since we could see those launches from our trailer park. Yes, he said, he had and they were pretty amazing: the huge ball of fire hurling the spacecraft into the heavens and then in no time at all disappearing, only to return from outer space precisely on time two weeks later after having traveled hundreds of thousands of miles and then landing as neatly as you might pull your car into the garage. Amazing! The precision of it, the marvelous science. Well, I said to him, do you realize that NASA, the same organization that put men on the moon and now sends them to the space station, is the organ...