Reply #8: But they're tuning in now [View All]

[Dogmudgeon]

A lot of scientists are getting really and truly freaked out.

First, the natural processes they were describing -- such as the Greenland thaw -- have not just sped up, but the speed itself has sped up. The feedback loop is far more powerful than anyone suspected.

Second, it is starting to look like a cosmic phenomenon. Every planet beyond Earth has been observed to be experiencing some kind of "planetary warming". The fact that we're immersed in a tenuous cloud of dust isn't helping any. Now, the race is on to determine whether it is kicking up the solar activity we've been seeing.

Third, the Earth is in the middle of a truly frightening die-off. Even the honeybees are threatened with extinction. Nothing like it has ever been seen in geology and/or paleontology, and it didn't even take a major impactor this time.

The worst part of this for the scientists is that there is no one they can confide their anxieties to. The so-called "skeptical" movement has so saturated the scientific world that merely copping to a case of heartburn can lead to a severe "debunking". Wallace Broecker, one of the main scientists behind the studies of ice age dynamics, has taken to talking like a politician when he's asked for an opinion. I have no doubt that when The Day After Tomorrow opened, climatologists were lined up in their local drugstores to buy plenty of Imodium and Pepcid AC.

The stuff of sci-fi is actually happening, and we're still playing footsie over whether it's man-made or natural, over whether Occam's Razor has been used and how best to get those grant funds for fiscal 2005.

Well, I ranted long and loud last night over the problems we'll also face with the end of cheap oil. I look at it as all of a piece -- our societies simply don't know how to plan for the future and our "leaders'" are motivated by power and profit and nothing else.

--bkl