OPINION: Global warming and the emotional divide

Meanwhile, I look at the dispute over global warming as much as a psychological issue as a political one.

We live in an age of tremendous fear. We have fear pushed at us from countless angles, whether it’s terrorists, pandemics, economic collapse, global warming, nuclear war, etc.

If you’re like me, you feel worn out by it. There’s just too much of it thrown in our faces.

In truth, at least emotionally, I want to put my head in the sand on any major doomsday matter that doesn’t involve an obvious solution. Logically, I know this is no way to live and function in the world. I know I have to be better than that.

But these are my honest feelings. You want to scare me? “Well, why don’t you just keep that to yourself?” That’s how I want to respond to doomsayers on a variety of issues.

So, when global warming is brought up, I feel that same emotional click inside. My first thought is, “shut up!” I want to put my fingers in my ears. I think society generally shares that feeling. We don’t want to hear it.

But my gut is going hard the other way. And my gut doesn’t have a “liberal” agenda unless it’s in front of a hot pizza. No, in fact, I want the scientists who push global warming to be wrong. How could I want anything else? It’s an awful prospect. And I certainly don’t want future generations to face any such reality.

But I get this sick feeling these days about the weather. Beyond what scientists tell us, it feels like it’s changing — and not for the better. And the “nothing-to-see-here” mantra of global warming skeptics isn’t meshing with that feeling I have watching these storms grow more and more fierce, whether it’s spring tornadoes or fall hurricanes.

Many climatologists say the earth’s seas are getting warmer and that weather is consequently getting more chaotic, more violent. No one storm proves such a thing, but the frequency of horrible weather events doesn’t do much to dispel the global warming theory either.

We are locked in an ideological — not an analytical —debate over this science, just as we are locked in fights over most all matters. We see these storms, but we can’t agree on whether there is a deeper issue at hand. It’s yet another red/blue shoutfest. They get so tiresome.

Of course, we can agree that weather patterns shift over time. We can study the earth and know that the climate has dramatically heated and cooled without any influence from humans.

On the flip side, we know that there has only been one industrial revolution on earth. With the world’s population currently estimated at 6,973,738,433, we are an environmental force on this planet. To say we have no impact on landscapes is absurd, because we see the evidence everywhere in our cities and our structures. Likewise, to say that billions of people with wide varieties of exhaust-producing machines don’t have any impact on the air we breathe and our atmosphere as a whole — well, that’s just wishful thinking, even though we can’t readily see our impact in the air as we can on the ground.

Obviously, the skeptics of global warming are winning this debate politically, because silence and inaction are by far the emotionally easier answers. No doubt, I would be comforted to learn that global warming scientists are all simply agenda driven, that the rise in temperatures is not true and that man has negligible impact on the earth’s environment.

But this requires an inward lie to myself. What we believe about grand calamity matters — pandemics, wars, apocalypse — is not so much a choice as a gut reaction to our perceptions, isn’t it?

And when bad storms approach now, I’m hit with a deeper fear than before. I see something more sinister in bad weather than I used to. And I believe it has to do with the additional fuel on the fire (the heat).

I don’t think our government or our populace is ready, willing or able to do much of anything about it. Unfortunately, I think we’ve proven that through our national political dysfunction. Our greatest hope is based on denigrating the science — visciously if we must. But how long can that be maintained?
I know that my fears of angry storms will likely get worse, not better, in years to come. But hopefully, 20 years from now I’ll look back at my handwringing and scoff just as the skeptics do now.

It would be a great joy to get this totally wrong.

Zach Mitcham is editor of The Madison County Journal.