Printed: 9/7/07
“Mom,” my second son asked a couple of weeks ago at the height of the August heat wave, “if you stood under the hole in the ozone layer, would you burn up?”
Were he a whole lot younger, this question would have alarmed me, as I would have felt duty bound to appear all-knowing and fabricate a learned answer on the spot. At 12, however, he is well aware of my intellectual imperfections. So I chose the Socratic method.
“Depends on where it is,” I said. “Do you know, by the way?”
“Antarctica, I think,” he said.
“Well, there you go. All that ice is sure to be a mitigating factor. A little sunscreen and you’d be fine.”
He rolled his eyes and wandered off to more intellectually engaging pursuits; i.e., YouTube. And I forgot about the exchange until a short news item caught my eye last week.
NASA, it seems, is now admitting that it inadvertedly miscalculated global warming trends due to a Y2K bug that overstated temperatures the agency collected in 2000. Turns out the hottest year on record in the U.S. is really 1934 – not 1998 or 2006, the previous record-breakers, which fall to second and fourth place, respectively.
Apparently the third hottest year was way back in 1921. In fact, according to the revised numbers, five of the 10 warmest years on record all occurred before World War II – none of which fit nicely into current popular theories about a relentlessly warming world.
Which is why I wasn’t surprised when the New York Times dismissed the revisions as a “statistically meaningless rearrangement of data.” Could be. But here’s the thing: does anyone believe the paper would have been so dismissive if the mistake had been reversed? If the temperatures turned out to be hotter than reported?
Hardly. We’d be seeing screaming headlines about America’s certain demise if we don’t change our ways and impose deep reductions in those infamous greenhouse gases that trap heat and create the ozone holes that so worry my son.
Please understand: I believe it’s been scientifically established that the earth is warming and that humans have contributed, in part, to that trend. I’m equally convinced we all could be doing much more to protect the environment, and should.
But the way to do is not by buying carbon offsets, or driving a Prius downtown from the suburbs every day, or wrecking the world economy spending multimillions to cut greenhouse emissions a fraction of a percent.
Do you know, that for half the annual cost of cutting the predicted global temperature rise by 0.11 degrees, UNICEF says we could buy basic health care, sanitation, clean drinking water and education for every inhabitant of the Third World? That’s the scale of investment we’re talking about – but those figures aren’t usually part of the public discussion, which for all its heat and fury, remains more about finding ammunition for a political “side” than consensus for a workable solution.
That’s why you’ll read a report about Antarctic ice shelves melting, with no mention that temperatures at the South Pole have been dropping for 50 years. That’s why the news that the world’s seas are only expected to rise 23 inches in the next century – instead of 20 feet, swamping Florida and New York – never makes it into Al Gore’s slideshow.
In consequence, finding public consensus on the smaller things – the value of clean streams and renewable energy sources, making buildings energy efficient, reducing sprawl and cutting our dependence on foreign oil – is harder to come by.
My husband, an architect with LEED certification (which means he knows all about making buildings “green”) says the average homeowner can do a great deal of good by simply switching to fluorescent lights, making sure the house is well-insulated, planting shade trees on the south side, and considering renovating rather than building new in some suburb 20 miles out when the family needs more room.
“That’s practical, not political,” he says. “It doesn’t have to be hard.”
And maybe it wouldn’t be, if our global warming prophets offered more leadership by example. Al Gore, for instance, would be far more persuasive if he cut his 10,000-square foot, eight-bathroom carbon footprint in Nashville down to, say, 4,000 and four.
You’ve probably seen his house pictured on the Internet. It’s making the rounds. My son showed it to me the other day.
“This is that guy that made ‘Inconvenient Truth.’ What a hypocrite,” he said.
I thought about mentioning the carbon offsets Al reportedly buys to make his lifestyle carbon-neutral, but let it go. Pictures speak louder than words, and all that. Just a little summer learning.
