"It will be hotter
and dryer in an Arizona summer."
COMMENTARY
By George Templeton
By George Templeton
Gazette Columnist
Faith and the Paris Climate Accord
It
was April of 1977 and I was looking forward to spring and longer
daylight hours. This was the time of year when the birds began to sing,
celebrating the purple flowers on the jacaranda trees that lined the
road. The smell of orange blossoms was in the air. My fancy turned to
the appreciation of nature, but the five mile long line of bumper to
bumper traffic moving at less than a walk was frustrating.
Constrained
to sitting by my desk job, I took the stairs instead of the elevator,
but that was not enough to overcome the stress of things. There had to
be a more satisfying experience out there, somewhere.
Four Wheeling to Nature
I
bought a Toyota Landcruiser, outfitted it with big tires and a heavy
duty roof rack which I reinforced with aluminum sheeting. I made the
back into a house on wheels using lumber. This way I could carry my
heavy duty jack, large boards to bolt it onto so it would not sink into
the mud, hand axes, saw, jerk strap, and all the essentials of life. I
could even sleep in the back without unloading everything.
Wild
turkey hunting would bring me peace of mind. Off we went to the high
country at 8000 feet, armed with a wooden turkey call and an over and
under gun, light weight 30-30 hand loads for the top barrel, and a
full-choke twenty gauge on the bottom.
Turkey Hunting
There
was still snow on the ground, everywhere. When I got stuck, I jacked
up the Landcruiser, put fallen tree limbs under the tires, and got
moving again. We went back in the forest where there was no one and set
up camp near a hill. I began my hunt before dawn. I climbed out of
the sleeping bag at four in the morning, planning to cook breakfast and
have a cup of coffee. Much to my dismay, the water barrel was frozen
solid but this was only a minor annoyance.
Off
I went, in the moonlight, to the top of the hill. My plan was to wait
for sunrise and listen 360 degrees around me for gobblers. It was cold
just sitting there in snow at below freezing temperatures. The gun
barrel was chillingly painful through my gloves, but it was worth it
because I was greeted by turkeys that morning.
I
heard and saw them, but never got closer than 100 yards. I tried to be
like a romantic turkey, calling for a mate. Some responded, but they
sensed they should not come too close. As it turns out, wild turkeys
are not dumb and they fly really well.
That
afternoon I gave up on the turkeys. I started to explore my
surroundings. There was snow everywhere, on the hillsides and in the
treetops. There were no footprints, no tire tracks, and only the sound
of the breeze and a crystal clear gurgling brook that I followed. I
thought, too bad that there are no fish, but then I was surprised as one
splashed. Woah, time to get my wife and the fishing poles! That
afternoon we both caught our limit of German brown trout. We packed
them in buckets filled with snow, brought them back to the camp, and
cooked them before the rigor mortis set in. It was the freshest fish
ever.
The
trip was an exhilarating mountain top experience that I will never
forget. I can still see the perfectly white snow on the trees and
hills, feel the warming afternoon breeze, and become deeply and
personally a part of it. This was the miracle that I was given to. I
was part of it, and it is part of me.
The July 2017 issue of the Scientific American
informs us that logging, agriculture, mining, and wildfires reduced
healthy pristine ecosystems by an area about the size of Egypt between
2000 and 2013. E. O. Wilson notes in his book, The Creation,
that the current rate of extinction of species is at least 1000 times
what it was before humans appeared on the Earth. At the current rate,
half the species of plants and animals on Earth will be gone or fated
for extinction by the end of the century and a quarter of them will be
gone in the next fifty years because of climate change alone. We are
hurting ourselves. We don’t see this because we are not personally
connected with nature, but nature is connected with us.
Unity
You
have no right to be generous with my money, but I give government
permission to tax me. Groups are different from individuals. The same
force that unites the T-party divides it from other groups. It is the
group that has power, not the self. People come together, but groups
split apart. The paradox of individual selfless patriotism is that it
increases the selfishness of groups. The proof is in politics and
religion.
Life
is not a rat race where we must beat the other fellow and destroy him.
We are concerned about social science, economics, the outsourcing of
jobs, and rising inequality in America. We worry about mankind’s
survival, extinction of species, and irreversible damage to the earth
predicted by the physical and life sciences. We are called upon to be
participants in the dance of life, not to be envious that the Paris
climate “conspiracy” was primarily for the “exclusive economic benefit
of other countries”. Will fear of the future, moral obligation or
greed be our motivator?
The
Republicans claim to be pro-business. They think that the denial of
global warming creates jobs. Today’s free enterprise has a short-term
outlook that sanctions social irresponsibility. Rapid climate change
causes crop failure, starvation, migration, and wars. Think of the jobs
that will be created to make the walls needed to hold back the ocean!
The Party Was Not a Negotiation
In
the 1990’s my company held several five million dollar week long
international parties for our customers. I know because I wrote a
syllabus and conducted seminars. There were goose steeping Russian
dancers, ice fountains flowing with vodka, chocolate mousse, expensive
hotel rooms, and many examples of creative things our customers were
doing to make the world a better place. It was a business fair like a
science fair. It sounds like a lot of money, but even then a single
wafer area cost a billion dollars. So, this effort at making connection
with customers and showing them how we could make the world a better
place, cost less than one percent of our new equipment budget. Now how
about Trump and the non-binding motivational Paris agreement that he
chose to bail out on? Did he win friends and influence them? Are his
penny-pinching deals, rather than connections with humanity, the
ultimate arbitrator of reality?
Pittsburgh and Paris
Pittsburgh
was a black city in 1955. In those days our home was heated by coal.
Our water heater was even coal fired. Do you think we will return to
that? We loved coal, but Pittsburgh has modernized. Forty years later I
rode the subway in Paris. It moved people efficiently and reduced
pollution.
The
Paris Accord was only a starting point, an agreement where every
country would set its own goals and try to reach them. Like my company
party, it was a motivational science fair. Trump claims that he
personally can drive a new economic bargain with the other 195 countries
in the Paris agreement, but they are not interested. He would attach
conditions to ensure that America comes first, contradicting the idea
that business agreements should be win-win propositions. Self-interest
is not the only reason for treaties and deals. Treating others as
economic conspirators misses the point. We share the same earth.
There Must be Facts, but What Do They Mean?
Americans
are altruistic. They would never make personal decisions that could
harm their grandchildren. But true believers have no qualms about
jeopardy. They subordinate their rationality to tribal whims. Their
loyalty supports the hypocrisy of their group.
Unfortunately,
global warming is a matter of political instead of scientific
discourse. Scientists do not say what the Republicans claim they do.
Global warming is more than a single temperature, ridiculed and taken
out of context
There are many explanations. It could be that tomorrow
never comes. (I don’t have a problem. Nobody tells me what to do!)
It could be political ideology and misguided patriotism (America first,
my country right or wrong). It could be the desire to maintain the
privileges of the status quo (No such thing as global warming). It
could be that God’s covenant is with the Republicans (Taxes are immoral,
God controls, we are not responsible, God said, just believe). It
could be intent to deceive (the desire for power and control, propaganda
that purports to educate but lies and distorts). It could be ignorance
of science, math, and data analysis. It is not a diligent questioning
of the facts.
The
purpose of statistics is to place bounds on uncertainty, but we don’t
discuss that. What are the mechanisms involved, sampling, proxies,
measurement, strength of the variables and interactions? What is the
standard deviation of the mean, the probable error, the confidence
interval, the Pearson correlation coefficient, and the mathematical
response surface? What is the risk we are taking if we are wrong and
there really is global warming?
Republicans
point out an increase of only 0.2 degrees, but that’s the reduction in
warming from struggling over the last agreement five years ago. Our
grandchildren could see nearly seven or eight degrees F if nothing more
is done. The average world temperature is about 58 degrees F. These
numbers have a tolerance that can go either way. There are large
variations in temperature with season and geography. It will be hotter
and dryer in an Arizona summer. Many plants don’t care about critical
thresholds like freezing until that happens. They have a temperature
range needed for survival.
Imagine
that the earth is a thermal conductor heated by the sun’s radiation.
It lacks convection from air and ocean currents. Its thermal
capacitance depends on its mass and specific heat. At first, heat flows
easily from the surface to the interior because of the large
temperature difference. But as the interior heats, this becomes less so
and the surface will more rapidly warm. This shapes the curve of the
temperature rise over time, revealing thermal time constants associated
with the curve’s inflection points and slope. Rates of change are more
revealing than the amount.
We
are measuring large changes on a scale of hundreds of years instead of
geologic history’s millennia (The earth is older than the Bible’s 6000
years). Is it a coincidence that these started happening during the
time of mankind’s industrial development? Why do you suppose the Trump
administration has defunded earth science? They don’t like facts that
challenge their worldview.
Seemingly
insignificant statistical data is more revealing than spectacular
catastrophes. It is true that the average, which is the most probable
value, is only a mathematical abstraction. The melting of Antarctica is
reality (reference July 2017 National Geographic), but it is
difficult to forecast. Trump is helping to make certain that we will do
nothing until Florida sinks into the ocean, but by then it will be too
late. What is operating here is the same thing that makes people think
they will beat the casino. Their education did not include the
mathematics of expected value.
Moral Man & Immoral Society
Reinhold
Niebuhr’s pessimistic 1932 book has been proven correct over and over
again. He wrote in the time of racial prejudice, the war to end all
wars, and the great depression. Marxism, not globalization and climate
change, was the issue in those days.
Marx
viewed evil as the consequence of social privilege maintaining
inequality so that wealth would not have to be shared. He portrayed
wealth and materialism as the fundamental driving force of history, not
politics or ideas. Modern science has statistically analyzed this. It
found that social class on opposing sides did not matter.
Communism
was an extreme implementation of the idea that wealth should be shared,
but historically it has not worked out that way. Stalin’s brutality
supports Niebuhr’s criticism about paltry group ethics. Today, we know
that social revolution is much more likely to come from quantum physics
than from ideology. Technology has advanced since the 1930’s.
Consequently, I am more optimistic than Niebuhr was.
As Thomas Friedman pointed out in his 2008 book “Hot, Flat, and Crowded”,
we are growing increasingly connected by travel, commerce,
communications, entertainment, and education. Our connections will
overcome power, egoism, and self-interest. We will find ourselves by
losing ourselves to the mutual needs of others, but not in individual
deals, made by an autocrat, that seek monetary returns more than
results.
America
may have done the most to reduce greenhouse gases, but it is
responsible for eighty percent of the world’s pollution and happens to
be the number two emitter in the world. Our accomplishments do not
exonerate us from unconditionally helping our neighbors. The world is
not laughing at us and conspiring to take our jobs. We have no reason
to envy them.
Around
300 AD some Greek monks classified the seven deadly sins. Pride is the
sin from which all others arise. It is the mother of injustice. Now,
why would that be? Pride dulls the senses, and is self-aggrandizing.
It destroys humility and empathy. It has all the answers and no need to
learn. It destroys the connections with our fellow-man.
The Coming Flood
Doesn’t
life call upon us to compete, and to create? Perhaps the people who
say that greed is good are confusing it with the striving that is part
of life’s expression. Humanity has the freedom to create, but its
personality dysfunction causes irreversible harm. We don’t see our
mutual immorality. Nature restores equilibrium, but at what cost? How
do we balance our social sympathy with our self-interest? Reinhold
Niebuhr gave us an often quoted clue. “God, grant us grace to accept
with serenity that which cannot be changed, courage to change that which
can be changed, and wisdom to know the difference.”
am a registered liberal who mostly toes the party line, but I am not
devoted to the idea of big government. I loathe the law in New York
state requiring gas pump nozzles to not latch. This means that I must
stand beside my vehicle, holding the nozzle lever open, instead of
latching it and walking into the gas station to use the john which, if
you’re an older male and hear gushing liquid, you feel a powerful urge
to do, so thanks to legislative overregulation, I am on the verge of
humiliating myself.
ave Mitch McConnell and the Republicans now, finally, tempted fate once too often?
omen have babies. If they didn’t, first the economy would collapse, and then the species would die out.
he
Senate’s bill to repeal the Affordable Care Act is not a healthcare
bill. It’s a tax cut for the wealthiest Americans, paid for by a
dramatic reduction in healthcare funding for approximately 23 million
poor, disabled, working and middle-class Americans.
