(Note from Rowland: apart from my Episcopalian friend’s ‘writing off’ all Baptists as climate change deniers – this one isn’t – and his not-so-subtle atheism (Yes!) this is a good article).

Let ‘Em Fry

By Harry T. Cook

12/30/10

The 2010 Census count means that my state (Michigan) will lose a congressional seat
as more and more of the U.S. population slouches toward the South and the West.
It is in the South and the West that Republicans continue their march toward hegemony,
and also where many nonbelievers in global warming hold forth.

Except for the fact that the global warming nonbelievers will want to begin draining
the Great Lakes to keep water at the ready in their taps and their fairways green,
they cannot otherwise do much immediate harm to the Rust Belt states. However, we
will get fewer federal dollars because we are less populated than in days of yore.
Our once-bustling factories are now dinosaur corpses, and our cities look more and
more like urban wastelands.

There is little hope of getting a climate-control bill through the next Congress,
but the poetically just thing about it is that the pumped GOP now runs rampant in
the very areas that will suffer most from rising sea levels and increasingly torrid
tropical heat. As the aging electrical grid gives up the ghost, funeral homes and
Baptist churches will be able to cash in on that by renting out those cardboard
fans to perspiring global warming nonbelievers.

That is, of course, a short-term reaction. Eventually all of us, regardless of the
latitude at which we live and have our being, will be subject to the effects of
global warming. That’s science talking, though not rocket science.

A simple machine first installed in the 1950s at the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii
will tell anyone who can understand numbers how many parts per million of heat-trapping
carbon dioxide abide in the atmosphere. The count was at 310 million parts per million
60 years ago. If there is no significant reduction in the toxic emissions from smokestacks
and auto and truck exhaust between 2010 and 2080, it is likely to be by then at
560 — or double what it was before the beginning of the Industrial Revolution.

Our house is on fire, and we’re debating whether those are actual flames or figments
of our imagination. Maybe we have a death wish in that we’d rather have our creature
comforts and conveniences now and hope to be dead and gone before the mercury bursts
through the top of the thermometer.

Considering how some evangelical Christian types in public office have demonized
the Theory of Evolution — the central operating unit of biological studies —
I am not surprised by their refusal to acknowledge the plain-as-day facts of melting
glaciers, rising seas, droughts, extremes of heat and cold, flooding, the extinction
of plant and animal life and the worsening problem of growing food in the places
it is needed most.

Such facts fly in the face of the pious belief that the imagined God of the Bible
continues to bless the human race (at least that part of it that believes in Him),
that he has entrusted the species with Earth’s dominion and will provide for and
protect them regardless of how they abuse the privilege.

What will it take by way of so-called natural disaster to get the attention of the
Believing nonbelievers — i.e. those who believe in providence and disbelieve the
facts?

As has been observed, the Great Lakes/Rust Belt states will not be the first areas
to suffer from the increasing effects of global warming. We up north may have to
dial down the thermostats in winter when the prices of natural gas and fuel oil
are increased a) to meet demand and b) to reward speculators, but we can survive
without air conditioning in summer if we have to. At least for another half-century
or so, we will not have alligators, Burmese python and other tropical varmints scaring
the bejesus out of us here in the 45th parallel zone.

So to those fact-doubters and myth-believers down South there in the Sunbelt, I
say Happy New Year, and practice fanning yourselves by hand. And do keep an eye
out for the reptiles. They love the heat.