What We Have Here is a Failure to Imagine

From the preface of a book published this week by science writer Eugene Linden, called Winds of Change:

In the late l970’s, climate specialists first started worrying about the possibility [of climate change]…but with the Iranian hostage crisis and stagflation dominating public concerns, the warning got little notice. The possibility that humans might be altering climate…only became an issue in l988, when Washington sweltered during an abnormal heat wave at the same time that Senator Timothy Wirth held hearings on the issue.

Assignments have taken me to both polar regions and out into the Gulf Stream in attempts to keep pace with the science of this unfolding story. Since l988, public concerns about climate change have waxed and waned with the weather, but in the United States at least, climate change has not been a pressing issue for the public despite periodic alarms raised by scientists…at least part of the problem is that, for all practical purposes, the threat is unprecedented. In this respect, our attitudes toward climate change are a little like American attitudes toward terrorism before September 11, 2001, or the attitude towards tsunamis of a tourist visiting Phuket, Thailand, before December 26, 2004. With regard to climate, it’s hard to imagine that we puny humans could affect something so all-encompassing as climate itself; it’s hard to imagine  what it would mean if climate started changing everywhere on earth; and today even those Americans who view climate change as a threat see it as an event that lies far off in the future.

From the Rush Limbaugh show for December 19, 2005, in response to a caller with a six-year-old son who was concerned about global warming. Limbaugh sent the caller to his (pay) site, where could be found "speeches by experts debunking the myths of global warming." Limbaugh added:

This is not to say that the earth isn’t warming! But the idea that humanity is causing it is something that has swept liberalism. Liberalism believes in gloom and doom. They believe we are destroyers. Especially prosperous people! They think we have no regard for what is here. They try to make it sound like…well, this is too complicated for your son to understand, but these people try to make it sound as if they are secularists, but they are as devoted to religion as anyone else is, they just have a different God…and Michael Crichton made a speech once that is eerie in its perceptiveness about the militant environmentalist wackos…and their belief system parallels the story of Genesis in striking ways, except there is one big difference. There never has been a Garden of Eden. If you go back 100 years, you find horse manure all over the streets. If you go back 200 years, you find pestilence and disease. If you go back further than that you find we are living in the best times possible! Life expectancy is at an all-time high. Global warming relies on a theory that we are destroying ecosystems. There is no evidence that we could destroy ecosystems.