Mister Warmth

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Mister Warmth

Colin McEnroe
To Wit

June 25 2006

When you work in talk radio, the world presumes you to be conservative. Hell, the world takes for granted that you are not merely conservative but right wing in a fairly nasty, posturing way. Somewhere around 95 percent of commercial talk radio is conducted in exactly that frame of mind.

Every day my email account is crammed with offers from PR firms who would like to help me undermine the left wing agenda, expose Hillary as a vicious bitch, drive homosexuals back into some darkened closet in the Castro district, celebrate our great success in Iraq and nail the Ten Commandments to the flanks of every moose grazing on government land, 9/10ths of which should be logged, drilled or strip-mined anyway, for Pete's sake.

There are flavors of the month. Earlier this year I was offered a wide array of guests who would be happy to explain what to do about "illegals," kind of the way Tom DeLay, earlier in his professional life, might have explained what to do about silverfish. I continue to receive emails from the Minutemen, a tin-pot crypto-Klan bigot collective angling for a good excuse to start the shooting. One of my favorites was their press release about the Minutemen Flag Day ceremony at the Alamo. Because the guy cleaning your office at night is basically just Santa Ana with a toilet brush, right?

The newest flavor is an old one: Global Warming Is A Lie-Toasted Glacier. The "news peg" is of course Al Gore's new movie, "I Told You So." Excuse me. It's called "An Inconvenient Truth."

Al Gore may not succeed in igniting the collective American will to do something about a very real problem, but he has certainly rekindled the careers of the feisty group of knot-head "scientists" who can be rushed once more into the breach of any paleo-conservative talk show to reassure the listeners that they can keep on driving their SUVs until the Messiah comes again.

One guest I could have had on last week was global-warming naysayer Joseph D'Aleo. He's "...the first director of meteorology at the cable TV Weather Channel, and has over 25 years experience in professional meteorology. In addition, he has served as member and chairman of the American Meteorological Society's Committee on Weather Analysis and Forecasting."

That would be the same AMS that issued a 2003 statement that said in part, "There is now clear evidence that the mean annual temperature at the Earth's surface, averaged over the entire globe, has been increasing in the past 200 years. There is also clear evidence that the abundance of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere has increased over the same period ... Human activities have become a major source of environmental change. Of great urgency are the climate consequences of the increasing atmospheric abundance of greenhouse gases."

There is a debate about whether the earth is getting warmer the same way there is a debate about whether the earth is spheroid. Yes, but not really. Can you find people who dispute global warming? Yes. You can also find more than one million who have credible evidence that Hailie Selassie was the Messiah. They practice Rastafari, and they're a swell bunch of folks, but their mere existence probably does not make you think you should believe that, too.

It is, however, kind of an interesting problem in what we might call reality studies. (There's a thicket of philosophical terms we could run through here, but I'll spare you). If Elie Wiesel, Stephen Hawking and Nelson Mandela say you really ought to clean your room, and Andrew Dice Clay says you really ought to eat an entire baking pan of brownies, you have a choice between what is, on solid authority, probably right and what is unquestionably more appealing. The majority of people are going to eat the brownies and then claim they were just following the advice of a very prominent figure.

So it goes with global warming. If you study the flow of scientific consensus over the last 10 years, you can see that scientists who doubted the global warming theory (including the idea that human activity is part of the cause) have been converted into believers, and that it's virtually impossible to find anyone swimming in the opposite direction

The fact that you can find somebody holding down an academic job in Huntsville, Ala., who is willing to go on talk radio and say otherwise should be grouped with the eternal availability of Holocaust deniers and academics who call the 9/11 dead "little Eichmanns." (That was Ward Churchill, not Ann Coulter, like there's a difference).

How do you prove that something is an acknowledged truth? It's harder than you think if there are well-funded crackpots pushing the have-a-brownie cause. One researcher simply searched for the words "global climate change" among peer-reviewed scientific journals from 1993 to 2003. She found 928 articles. Only 75 percent of them actually took a position. Of that group 100 percent embraced the "consensus position" that global warming is real and at least partly caused by humans. Not one article in the 928 rejected that position, which was also embraced, just for example, by the national science academies of the G8 nations, Brazil, China and India in 2005.

And yet, somehow, on the radio and elsewhere, there is still "a debate."

Gore's movie suffers from way too much Al Gore, which is a problem that, unfortunately, Al Gore suffers from too. And some of his specific examples and his glaciers slopping into Slurpees may overstate what is nevertheless a valid point.

I think he's the wrong leader to make this case. I prefer the guy who said it last year, said it more succinctly than Gore ever could: "I recognize that the surface of the earth is warmer and that an increase in greenhouse gases caused by humans is contributing to the problem."

That was President George W. Bush. Of course, he was standing at the time in Copenhagen, where there's no Rush Limbaugh and where the only fairy tales they accept are by Hans Christian Andersen.

Copyright 2006, Hartford Courant