Misconceptions

I don't know where some people get their information or how they come to believe some of the things they do.

Check that. I know exactly where some people get their information and I know exactly why they come to believe it.

In our divided political climate, there's one thing that has worked hardest to keep us divided and polarized: right wing talk shows and blogs. If you're been alive in the United States since the mid 90's you definitely know someone that is a big fan of one or another of these blowhards: Limbaugh, Hannity, O'Reilly, Coulter, Savage, Drudge, and the whole of Fox News.

I don't mind if people have reasoned, well thought out positions that happen to be different from mine. What I do mind is when some illogical whack job with a talent for propaganda starts misleading people about how the world works and influences people to not worry about their own greed and poor choices - it's that LIBERAL over there that is screwing up the world.

I hear lots of seriously cockeyed statements being passed off as fact. Before I go too far, I have to say that conservatives are not the only ones making absurd statements. Rev. Wright's assertion that the government started AIDS and Rosey O'Donnell's claim that 9/11 was a government conspiracy come to mind, and that doesn't even begin to cover it.

Those are easy to dismiss as wild ravings, though. For some reason, some of the wild ravings, particularly anti-environmental ones, from the right really get under my skin. So here's a short list of some of the craziest ones.

CO2 is a natural product and it is ridiculous to classify it as a harmful pollutant. No one says that we should eliminate CO2 or that it's bad. At natural levels, it's around 5% of the atmosphere. It's fluctuated over geological time, but not much. It's stayed within a pretty tight band around an average that is about a quarter or a third of where it's at today. Today it's driving up very rapidly, and 999 out of 1000 actual schooled, studied, vetted, legitimate climate scientists will tell you that humans are tipping the scale in the increase. If you truly believe that you can't have too much of any natural substance, try sitting down and drinking 3 gallons of water all at once and see if you survive the ordeal.

Humans can't make that big of a difference, if one volcano went off, it would put more CO2 in the air than the world output of CO2. If true, my response is "so what?" Are we saying that if some other catastrophe would be worse, we should completely discount any other actions that aren't that bad? That's like saying "so what if I have a problem with cocaine, if I was shooting up heroin, I could destroy my life really quickly." Or better yet, so what about my drug problem, a truck could hit me tomorrow. By this logic, we should feel free to commit any act we want (criminal or negligent) because a comet could hit the earth some day and wipe everything out. Historically, volcanoes do erupt and disrupt weather patterns worldwide. Really large eruptions, like Krakatoa disrupted weather for a couple of years before the earth returned to more or less normal. What disrupted the weather was particulate in the upper atmosphere, not so much the CO2. It would be good to have the earth's climate system in a pretty good balance before getting a hammerblow such as this, rather than having it already teetering on the edge when hit hard by some extreme blow.

More oil is good. We should drill in Anwar and off the coast of Florida because we need more oil. Well, we are drilling in places we haven't for a long time, we're getting what used to be uneconomic reserves out of oil sands in Canada and the shale deposits in the U.S. are also being looked at seriously. We're thinking about drilling in the Arctic (can anyone imagine a nice combination of Titanic and Exxon Valdez?), and thinking about reviving coal in a big way. This is great if you believe in the rapture and figure there won't be a world to live in about 50 years from now, so it doesn't matter what you do today. Thinking that the solution to our problems is more oil is like the addicted gambler that thinks he has a gambling problem because all the casinos in town won't let him in anymore.

The latest strange flip-flop in anti-environmental propaganda was that we didn't need to increase ethanol production, and then once we did and grain prices started to spike, that ethanol production couldn't make any difference in grain prices. The 2000 to 2006 boom in ethanol made a lot of people a lot of money. When the bottom fell out of the Ethanol industry, a lot of people then started saying that it wasn't ever a valid model anyway. Now that food prices are spiking, these same people are saying that there is no way that this could be a result of ethanol production.

There is a problem with all this hot air and rhetoric. Many think that matters of fact are somehow subject to people's opinions and that we should somehow be able to express our view or vote democratically about reality. Reality doesn't care what you think. Reality has this nasty habit of disregarding your opinion and doing what it's going to do despite what you think. The problem is that complex systems do not then leave enormous signs in the sky that announce what's really happening. To find out what's really happening, you have to actually go out and do some research, not read a blog or listen to talk radio.