Walt came in my office today and proposed a 2-PhD outing. These are occasional jaunts we take when some vital research activity come up that requires two PhDs to drive somewhere, such as going to Lowes to buy Scrubbing Bubbles*, going to FedEx to mail a package, or, in this case, going to the ice company to buy dry ice for shipping. Naturally, the alternative being staying in my office and working, I put on my coat.
I really have to take a picture of the ice company sometime. It must have been in the same building since people used iceboxes rather than refrigerators. The windows are cracked, the paint is almost absent, and there’s a little canvas awning sheltering the front entrance that is more holes than canvas. It’s adorable. Anyway, you go into this tiny little cluttered office and tell them you want 5 pounds of dry ice, and the secretary/receptionist/bookkeeper comes out from behind her desk, grabs a pair of gloves, and squeezes past you out the front door. She goes in the plant through another outside entrance and eventually emerges with some dry ice, which she weighs back in the office.
Today, while this was going on, there were a couple of other guys there, and we were chatting. It came up that we worked at the university, and he started talking about global warming, for some reason. First he wanted us to agree that, as professors, we wouldn’t give better than a D to a student who measured climate change without a baseline. We were both a bit confused by that, but it came out that he’s saying that we don’t know what climate was like in the past, so how do we know this isn’t just a natural cyclical change.
Usually I’d blow this sort of thing off, nod, smile, and go back to the office, but the IPCC’s new summary report just came out, and I’d been reading it since the day before. So I pointed out that we do have good evidence that it’s now warmer than at any time in the last 1300 years. And that you can make computer models of what temps should be with just natural effects such as changes in solar intensity and volcanic activity, and then other models that use those effects plus human contributions, and the natural ones don’t fit the observed data. The ones with human-produced CO2 do fit the data, and the data show a lot more warming than you’d expect from natural causes.
And so on. He asked for my email address, and he’s going to send me a link to some site that says Mars has global warming too, so it can’t be our fault.** We eventually left, and now I’m back here stewing.
See, the IPCC summary is clear. It’s getting warmer, and human-produced CO2 (and other gases) are a large part of the reason. And I’m reading lots of responses and discussion online from relatively well-informed people. But some nutcase web site, or Fox News, seems to the voting public to be just as authoritative, even though there are essentially no studies in the scientific literature that disagree with the basic conclusions any more. Worse, the oil companies are paying people to put out dissenting views, just like the tobacco companies used to sponsor “research institutes” to deny that cigarettes cause cancer.
When will the voting public be convinced? When it’s too late to do anything about it. It’s already too late to prevent some major problems, although we can mitigate them significantly if we reduce emissions now.
I’m depressed.
*Walt’s the Radiation Safety Officer on campus. Turns out that Scrubbing Bubbles is the cleaning product of choice for removing radioactive contamination from stuff.
**Mars is warming, at least at the poles; like the Earth, changes in its orbital tilt affect how much sun gets to it, and it’s apparently coming out of an ice age. It’s totally unrelated to climate change here, as our orbital tilt isn’t related to the orbital tilt of Mars.