Believe It or Not           

  

Harry T. Cook
By
Harry T. Cook
8/22/14

 

 

Six inches of rain in the space of 90 minutes here in southeastern Michigan, which last I knew was still part of the temperate zone, turned a third of my small city into a tropical swamp. My house and those of my neighbors were inundated. The curb on our street looks like a huge garbage dump.

 

Meteorologists and climatologists are pretty much unanimous that our recent Noahic deluge was due to climate change brought on by domestic and industrial pollutants being pumped into the atmosphere. We are told to expect more such heavy rains as time goes on.

 

So let us stipulate that global warming is a fact and that human beings have contributed to it in no uncertain terms, mostly through the continued burning of fossil fuels resulting in smokestack and exhaust pipe CO2 emissions.

 

The observation made by Shakespeare's Earl of Warwick that the angry trumpet sounds alarum fits our own situation to a tee, but too many have no ears to hear. Maybe if they could see what's left of my basement and family room, they might listen. Meanwhile, the result of their deliberate deafness may be found in Warwick's next line: And dead men's cries do fill the empty air.*

 

What, you ask, prompts the trumpet to be sounded? This: Sea levels are ineluctably rising. Monster storms threaten the well-being of millions across the globe. Much land once arable has become irredeemably sere. And, while living far from any significant body of water, I sometimes have lakefront property. At high tide, I need a canoe.

 

The trouble for one thing is the industrial burning of coal -- in particular for the production of electricity for energy-hungry America -- and the emissions of gasoline-powered trucks and automobiles. The comfort and convenience thus derived mute the angry trumpet's alarum.

 

The worst of it is characterized by U.S. Senator James Inhofe of Oklahoma, who pronounces the scientific evidence for global warming "a hoax." Another upstanding American running for Congress from Florida insists that the source of any talk about climate change can be traced directly to Satan.

 

Scientists can only shake their heads in dismay and keep on with their work. They must often feel that people in high places perceive them as un-American, as well as unsavory job-killing fiends. Making matters worse, Congress does not and apparently will not cooperate with President Obama in responding to the angry trumpet's alarum.

 

One poll suggests that it is only when people are exhausted by persistent heat waves that they acknowledge, and then only grudgingly and tentatively, the evidence of climate change. But soon enough come the chill of autumn and the snows of winter, and all's well that ends well.

 

Among other things we are told by the Pew Research Center is that a considerable percentage of Americans just "don't believe in global warming." Believe in? Really? You mean that it comes down to what the American people "believe" rather than know? What does it mean when belief runs counter to the plain facts at hand?

 

Aha! Welcome to the world of organized religion.

 

A preacher with great drama can recite Genesis 8:22 (While the earth remaineth, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night shall not cease) and thus remind his flock that it was the promise of God to Noah and his survivors that never again would things be allowed to get so far as that original and punitive inundation. If that be true (which, of course, it must be if it's in the Bible), then global warming and all its manifestations are simply Satan's temptations to subvert the vows of belief in a merciful deity.

 

Now there is a bill of goods that even to the cursory eye appears to be a very bad deal. Yet it is bought and paid for by folk who evidently do not want to accept the growing body of troublesome fact that this "fragile Earth, our island home"** is, after all, vulnerable to the wanton conduct of its human tenants and that seedtime and harvest may soon cease in just the very places that depend on both.

 

No amount of warning from the Pentagon that global warming and the havoc it leaves in its wake constitute a critical security concern has to date moved such climate change deniers as Inhofe to change their tune. Their reasoning, however loopy, supports their proclamations, however bereft of fact.

 

The oil and gas lobby is intent upon fattening its already corpulent body with more and more petrodollars, and to hell with the atmosphere. That lobby can and does use those dollars to command their legislative lapdogs to heel, sit, lie down, roll over and beg.

 

Maybe the bipartisan triple whammy of Henry Paulson, George Schultz and Robert Rubin and their recently issued manifesto warning that, due to global warming, more than a million homes and businesses along the nation's coastal lands could be under water by the end of the century if not before may change some minds. Or not.

 

The trouble is the belief thing. It doesn't matter what one chooses to believe about a thing absent knowledge. What matters is knowledge, the search for it, its acceptance and acting upon it. The immediately previous sentence is the rational definition of the verb "to believe."

 

It is now apparent that all honest inquiries into why the polar ice sheets are melting, why species common to tropical climes are moving into what we used to think of as subtropical and even temperate regions, why sea levels are rising to dangerous heights all have to do with global warming and the carbon emissions that clearly drive it.

 

Believe it or not: This "fragile Earth our island home" is turning on us as a species because our hot pursuit of irresistible desires is injuring her. She is fighting back in raging storms, hurricanes, withering drought and ever-rising waters. She will continue thus to speak until we hear, until we internalize the knowledge of it all and, finally, believe. And, believing, act.

 

Meanwhile, The angry trumpet sounds alarum.

 

 

*   Shakespeare, W. Henry the Sixth, Part the Second. Act V, Scene 2

** Book of Common Prayer 1979. New York, NY. The Seabury Press, 1976. 370

 


Copyright 2014 Harry T. Cook. All rights reserved. This article may not be used or reproduced without proper credit.
 

Readers Write 
 

THE READERS WRITE feature is not available this week due to the dislocation of our editorial operation due to the flood mentioned above. If you have sent us an e-mail, it will eventually be read and responded to on an individual basis. Thank you for your interest in these essays. Stay dry.

 

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