Global warming's all the rage.Everywhere you go, you hear about it.
Whether it's in the classroom where an environmental-science course is being taught or the latest screening of Al Gore's film "An Inconvenient Truth" or the ridiculous "Day After Tomorrow," the impending doom of climate change has apparently become public enemy No. 1.
Whenever there's this sort of panic, however, we seem to lose our healthy skepticism. We forget that, for years, the environmentalists have talked of impending apocalypse due to this or that human behavior, only to see humanity (and the world) move on to another day.
CRYING 'WOLF'?
Only 30 years ago, people were concerned about the impending crisis of global cooling. On Aug. 14, 1975, The New York Times reported that the "earth may be heading for another ice age."
Many other publications made similar predictions, among them the magazine Science, which declared that "continued rapid cooling of the earth" could bring about what they termed "a full-blown, 10,000-year ice age."
Though I am too young to have experienced this unrest firsthand, I have spoken with many people who went to college during the 1980s and took science courses. I've heard from many of them that professors then were saying we would run out of oil within a decade.
Yet, that sounds awfully familiar to me: I think I heard the same thing in my environmental-science class last year!
So how is it that we continue to take doom-and-gloom environmental predictions as gospel, when they've cried "wolf" so many times? I'm not quite sure.
It could be, as novelist Michael Crichton has noted, that many of us look at environmentalism more as a religion than a science. If you talk to an environmental activist and challenge them, they will sound more like an evangelist than a scientist. Much of what they believe is based on emotion, and emotion often clouds judgment.
TOO SOON TO TELL
Meanwhile, here in Seattle, King County Executive Ron Sims recently stated in a press release that the county is "well positioned to meet and exceed the Kyoto Protocols on Climate Change." All that while Puget Sound Energy is pushing its customers to save energy during a season of what they call "unseasonably cold temperatures."
Now, I don't want anyone to get me wrong. I am concerned about the environment. You'll have trouble finding a paycheck from Exxon Mobil or some such entity written out to me. And I think I can find common ground with folks like Ron Sims and Seattle Mayor Greg Nickels, both of whom believe that our future relies on our need to invest in alternative energy.
But don't you think it's time we stopped fretting about the end of the world and calmed down a bit? After all, 30 years from now, we may be saying, "Remember global warming?"
Michael Powell can be reached at needitor@nwlink.com.
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