Climate Change

It was a pretty normal day at my house for old retirees. I was trying to decide whether to go to bed early or watch another nighttime drama series. Not wanting to rush a big decision, I closed one eye and leaned back in my recliner. Thus, I was only half watching the show as they portrayed an island nation being washed away due to global warming. I came fully awake when the show indicated America was solely responsible for the demise of this small, fictional principality. I ignored the rest of the show and focused on what I knew and had heard about global warming.

Winters, as a general rule, are not as severe as they were when I was a kid. Not only have I observed this, but I believe the published scientific data are true and accurate. We have been told by experts, with long lists of letters behind their names, that man is the cause for this change. I respect expert opinions, but I have known expert scientists to be wrong. I have been advised for the past thirty years or so to take an aspirin-a-day for heart health. Just last month, experts discovered what I have known forever; they burn holes in my stomach and are no longer recommended. I remember the controversy over whether babies should sleep on their back or stomach. We wore the hair off of our firstborn turning her over and over as the experts changed their opinion. The first suspected cause of climate change was hairspray. The aerosol cans caused holes in the ozone layer, then it was cow flatus, now it is carbon emissions. These same experts blame early man for hunting the mammoth to extinction. Did our stone age ancestors also kill off all the saber tooth-tigers and cave bears? Some things just don’t add up.

I like the Discovery and National Geographic channels. They seem to present information that, for the most part, is unbiased but often leaves me with more questions than answers. I watched a show on the Great Rift Valley where man is supposed to have first come down from the trees. Cave paintings depict a lush landscape where now there is only desert. What caused the area to dry up? The landscape of Washington state was sculpted by repeated floods as ice dams repeatedly collapsed and rebuilt to form Lake Missoula. The evidence is still there, but the glaciers are gone. Ten thousand years ago our climate warmed, and the glaciers receded to the polar ice caps. What caused our planet to warm? It surely wasn’t carbon emissions. More recently, peat diggers in Scotland discovered the remains of pine stumps that grew over the entire region four thousand years ago. The evidence indicates that what is now treeless subarctic tundra was warm enough to support a great forest. What has caused the climate in Northern Scotland to cool over the past four thousand years? Our Scottish ancestors were too few and too primitive to change their ecosystem, but it did change.

Climate change experts agree our climate has been changing for as far back as we can find archaeological records, but they claim this time it is different. Man has changed the face of the Earth. Technology has made it possible for us to control our environment. Sometimes that is good, and sometimes it is bad. The proliferation of plastic waste is apparent wherever you look. Unpolluted streams are becoming more and more rare. I have seen the clouds of smog over Los Angeles and even darker clouds over Beijing. We humans have advanced to the point we can destroy our planet. Is our reliance on fossil fuels warming our planet, or is this just another normal fluctuation? I don’t know. There are too many unanswered questions, but I think it is best if we err on the side of safety and do what we can to reduce carbon emissions. If the outspoken experts are wrong, and climate change is not man made, we would do no real harm. If, however, they are right, and we do nothing, the consequences will be dire.

(Frank Watson is a retired Air Force Colonel and a long time resident of Eastern Washington. He has been a freelance columnist for more than 19 years.)