Blamblog - Brett Lamb's Blog

Saturday, June 03, 2006

An Inconvenient Plot Point

One day the professor of my first year natural science class announced that there was no scientific proof to support the theory of global warming. But that didn't stop Al Gore from making a movie about the subject 18 years later.

We saw An Inconvenient Truth at a packed matinee this afternoon and it's an excellent concert film. I love charts and graphs and Gore makes liberal use of them, though I took issue with the overused boiling frog analogy to describe inaction on the issue (except in Stephen Harper's case; he's pulling out of Kyoto just because he's obtuse).

A better analogy is what happened in the Star Trek TNG episode, Force of Nature. The Enterprise crew encounters a pair of radical scientists who claim the use of warp drive technology is tearing apart fabric of space-time around their home and one of the scientists commits suicide to prove the theory. It's decided that warp travel needs to be limited, but the plot point is quickly ignored and eventutal written out of the series because it's such a bummer. In reality, the issue has been ignored by people in much the same way although the consquences can't be as easily addressed by typing "and then they made a better warp drive that didn't wreck the galaxy."

The oil industry has responded to the doc the same way they always do, by casting doubt on the science: Carbon Dioxide, it's in you to give. And certainly there are many first year nat sci profs telling their students that the science behind climate change is dubious, melting glaciers be damned! But maybe what science tells us doesn't matter, maybe there's a higher power. I once had this conversation with a climate change skeptic:

RIGHT-WING SKEPTIC: There's no such thing as global warming!

BLAMB: Say that's true. But you also preach that the market will address changing circumstances in the world, right?

SKEPTIC: Yes.

BLAMB: Insurance companies have been adjusting their rates to account for increasing claims resulting from weather damage. So the market is saying that the climate is changing, that damage from weather events is increasing. Even if there isn't actually global warming, if the market says that damage from weather events is getting worse and the climate is changing, doesn't that make it so?

That shut him up.

4:31 PM , # ,