The Trump Administration has been undoing efforts of previous Administrations to stop worsening global warming with greenhouse gasses. I’m reminded of the Jonestown massacre in which Jim Jones led an American religious cult through mass murder and suicide in Guyana. Dismantling our efforts to stave off global warming is both mass murder and mass suicide. Scientists describe it as the next mass extinction – of us.
When we moved to Albany, our yard was covered with two feet of snow for almost the entire winter. No longer. So, I’m convinced our globe is warming. We can see for ourselves that glaciers are shrinking; they’re nearly gone in Glacier National Park. But well beyond my or your local observations, scientists are using censors all over the world that reveal how much the world is warming.
Physicists established centuries ago that carbon in the atmosphere mirrors the heat produced on earth back to earth. That wasn’t political. In 1859, Irish physicist John Tyndall, working at the Royal Institution in London, detected "the atmosphere admits of the entrance of solar heat; but checks its exit, and the result is a tendency to accumulate heat at the surface of the planet." Other scientists, including an American woman, got similar results around the same time. For nearly the next two centuries, scientists have been measuring the effect. Almost half a century ago, James Hansen and his colleagues predicted the changes we’ve been dealing with since.
The impact is all around. With their censors, measurements and reports from across the globe, scientists have found plants, birds and animals changing their habitats; parts of the country getting drier, other parts wetter; coastlines shrinking; ocean reefs dying and with them the food chain for marine life and fisheries. It’s not just local weather. Thousands of scientists across the globe have been contributing their own measurements.
Science works by careful measurement, comparison and experiments. It worked that way for penicillin, which could have saved my sister’s life. It led George Washington to have American soldiers inoculated against smallpox so they could better fight the British. Science produced nearly everything we deal with in the modern world from medicine to electronics to travel, here and in space. It’s fundamental to industry and keeps us comfortable and entertained at home. Science made America a world leader. Disbelief in science will make us the world’s punching bag. Don’t believe in science? I don’t think you’d want to live the way people did before the scientific revolution.
Scientists are telling us that most of the world is becoming increasingly uninhabitable – too hot, too dry, or under water, in conditions much more extreme, amounting to what scientists describe as the sixth extinction – of us.
We can stop it – if we’re willing to cooperate. Since many now depend on the greenhouse gases that are making the world uninhabitable, it’s important to help everyone through the transition to a world without greenhouse gasses – to make it a public obligation to protect people who don’t have the means to shift to newer forms of energy, to provide new ways of powering what people need, and to resist the lobbyists and stop the production of greenhouse gasses.
But the choice is to risk the lives and futures of all those we love. That’s not a choice for me. The behavior of the felon in the White House is mass murder and mass suicide. It would be cheaper in both lives and money to stop it now.
Steve Gottlieb’s latest book is Unfit for Democracy: The Roberts Court and The Breakdown of American Politics. He is the Jay and Ruth Caplan Distinguished Professor Emeritus at Albany Law School, served on the New York Civil Liberties Union board, on the New York Advisory Committee to the U.S. Civil Rights Commission, and as a US Peace Corps Volunteer in Iran. He enjoys the help of his editor, Jeanette Gottlieb
The views expressed by commentators are solely those of the authors. They do not necessarily reflect the views of this station or its management.
