Tuesday, October 13, 2009

Earth Matters: Flat earthers eat their children


I can’t help it. Darkness burrows into my soul and chews at my attitude like an evil malignancy. My brain shuts down and sleep becomes my only escape. I awake to no morning sunlight and close my eyes again to deny outside darkness.

Cold fingers my marrow, freezes my hands and numbs my skin. I don gloves and more clothes—that’s why they make gore-tex—and gather warmth to my core. I can take the cold—I signed up for it—but the darkness gets me. There is nothing for it at 39 degrees north latitude except to move south…and that won’t happen.

The irony isn’t lost on me when this time of year I again jump on the sky-is-falling-global-warming bandwagon. Here I am, up at the head of the draw at 9,000 feet in the frozen food section, freezing my ass off and hollering that global warming will destroy the world…as we know it. I’m sure that would be just fine for some folks.

Other folks simply don’t believe global warming is happening and deny anthropogenic—human—causes as responsible. U.S. Senator James Inhofe said, “Much of the debate over global warming is predicated on fear, rather than science…The threat of catastrophic global warming is the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American People.”

I have a friend in Denver who categorically denies global warming and rejects any assertion that human industry is at fault.

“It is simply liberal propaganda,” he posits, “promulgated because they can’t find any other meaningful agenda.”

I asked when was the last time he visited Rocky Mountain National Park to see where the glaciers used to be. When was the last time he walked on a receding glacier or negotiated recessional moraines? Been in any floods lately? He pleaded a restrictive work load and admitted he seldom leaves Denver.

These are the guys I liken to flat-earthers. Whatever minimal understanding of human nature I enjoy informs me that those who denied the earth as round, labored under the same mindset as those who today believe there is no such thing as global warming…and if there were, it’s not our fault. Yes: flat-out, hot-headed human nature.

But, hey! Columbus has already weighed anchor and is headed off across the warming ocean to a new world. Science confirms the poop in the fan, although the minute one bunch of scientists stands up and says the world is melting, another stands up and says the first is full of nonsense. More human nature.

Anecdotal and visual evidence is worth something, however, and I’m convinced that sure as winter is around the corner, global warming is changing our world. Here is some of that anecdotal stuff I am talking about.

Many years ago, I weighed anchor myself on a 1,000-mile canoe trip north down Canada’s Mackenzie River. This massive and moving body of water drains much of northern Canada through its delta into the Arctic Ocean. We floated haphazardly north in the giant flow, paddling up tributaries to fish and camping on shores scoured yearly by ice flows at spring breakup. Farther north, trees disappear at timberline into hummocky infinities of reindeer moss and permafrost.

An August, 2009 Associated Press article brought my Mackenzie trip back to me: “Climate trouble may be bubbling up in the Far North.” Among the myriad problems of melting ice caps, it seems permafrost is melting and releasing greenhouse components carbon dioxide and methane gas. Think stinky swamp gas trapped inside frozen tundra, melting and bubbling up. This is a feedback loop: Climate changes melt permafrost which releases methane which contributes to warming which melts…on and on.

I have also walked on Alaska’s Root Glacier in the Wrangell and St. Elias Mountains. The glacier is melting and it is difficult to figure where the glacier ends for the recessional moraine obscuring its nose. Unable to transport erosional material, the glacier itself is largely covered with debris. I have not experienced the flooding in Bangladesh where the Ganges, Brahmaputra and Meghna Rivers meet sea level a little too high for human habitation. Nor have I witnessed ongoing wildfires turning California to ash.

In the long run, it won’t matter what the flat-earther, global-warming deniers think. We are probably long past a tipping point where we could have reversed our warming climate trends; denial simply won’t matter. Furthermore, I’ve discovered that flat-earthers didn’t really eat their children, but maybe they should have.