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On Icarus’ Wings and Global Warming Things

"...with melting wax and loosened strings, 

sunk hapless Icarus, on unfaithful wings - Erasmus Darwin

Hubris: extreme haughtiness or arrogance, an indication of being out of touch with reality and an overestimating one's own competence or capabilities. It was the one vice that the ancient Greeks feared, a crime against the gods. Much like we have our Biblical tales to teach ethics and morals, they had their stories of the gods and mythical events. One of my favorites is of Daedalus and his son Icarus who are imprisoned in a tower on an island of Crete surrounded by water to prevent Daedalus from telling the public his knowledge of the Labyrinth, which he designed. Patrolling war ships make leaving by sea impossible. Yet, MacGyver has nothing on Daedalus who engineers a masterful escape attempt. He takes wax and feathers and builds wings for his son and him. The father and son take flight, sailing over the heads of their prison guards and the ships there to confine them. Yet, Icarus is young and like all young people he does not listen to his father. He, in the enjoyment of flight, soars too high into the heavens. The sun causes the wax to melt, and with a blink of an eye, Icarus is gone. He falls to his death. Hubris.

Unlike the Greeks, for us, hubris is a virtue. American exceptionalism, a people called by God, the “shining city on the hill, ” and we know more than the rest of the world. A few years ago I had a chance to have a meal with former President Jimmy Carter. Being young and stupid, I asked him when he knew that his administration was in trouble. Giving me a look that only comes from age and wisdom, he said, “You are too young to remember this. I gave a speech in which I asked the American people to be humble. Afterwards, I walked back to the Oval Office. There were messages and phone calls from outraged Congressmen, Senators, friends… and I knew I was hated.” Ronald Reagan returned pride back to the American people – it was morning in America again - and Icarus’ wings began to melt.

If you visited one hundred doctors and ninety-eight of them, except for a podiatrist and a dermatologist, concluded that you have brain cancer and need surgery right away, or you are going to die, what would you do? Let’s pretend you know nothing about cars. You are having some automobile problems. You visit one hundred mechanics and they all conclude that your carburetor needs to be rebuilt, except for a couple of brothers who own the only tow truck in the area. If you don’t get it rebuilt, your vehicle is going to break down and the resulting damage is going to cost you a lot more. Who do you listen to?

Okay, are you a climatologist? Do you have an advanced science degree, maybe a masters or Ph.D.? Have you made it your life’s work to gather data and study the facts about what is happening to this planet? Have you written peer reviewed papers and studies, documents that your fellow climatologists can poke holes in and point out your faulty logic, or point out places you might have made a mistake? No? Then how filled with hubris are you, if you do not believe in global warming? Science is not a populist endeavor, a one man/one vote. How arrogant are you to think your opinion on climate change is equal to individuals whose whole reputations and lives have been devoted to studying this issue? If they are wrong, it destroys their careers and reputations. If you are wrong, you just go back to watching “Jersey Shore.” It is like confronting a French scholar about their translation, admitting you have no background with the romance language, but you have eaten French fries and French toast, seen a French postcard, and on occasion engaged in a little French kissing, so you think that scholar does not know what they are talking about. Like almost everything else in life, we have to place our faith in experts all the time, just to get through the day. So, ninety-eight percent of climate scientists believe global warming is happening, compared to fifty-eight percent of Americans.

What is amazing, is the almost unanimous consensus in the scientific community. This kind of agreement rarely happens. In fact, when petroleum geologists, i.e. the people, who for the most part, are getting paid by the oil and gas companies, and conservative think tanks to doubt, and meteorologists (64 percent), i.e. the weather guy or gal, basically climatology’s podiatrists and dermatologists, are factored in, it is hard to find a scientist who disagrees that climate change is happening. None, zero, zip, of the deniers have released a peer-reviewed study or paper backing up their claims. It is one thing to play a verbal shell game with Joe Six-pack because he has no clue whether you are shading the facts, lying, or just pulling facts out of your backside. It is another to make the same statements with people who have the facts at hand. Among people in the know there is no controversy. Global warming is real. These are not hippies or environmentalists. They are cold, rational scientists.

It is an amazing time to be alive. We are witnesses to two substantial events, the dawn of the computer revolution, which will change how humanity lives more dramatically than the industrial revolution, and we have watched scientific consensus in action. Science as a discipline is extremely conservative in nature. It takes years and decades to debate a theory, gather data, test and retest that data, gather more data, until agreement is reached, and that often never happens. Climate change was a fringe theory in the 1930s by an Englishman named Guy Stewart Callendar, who believed that rising carbon dioxide concentrations could increase global temperatures. As more data was gathered, the theory was debated for more than eighty years forming a conclusion that almost every scientist believes. Think about the global warming theory as a game of Clue. With the first roll of the dice, Callendar figured out that Col. Mustard killed Mrs. Scarlett in the library with the candlestick. Everyone else playing the game realized that there could be a thousand other scenarios. As more information came in, suspects eliminated, rooms scratched off, slowly but surely everyone else came to agree with Callendar’s conclusion. The best minds in their fields have combed through the data. So, when some weather dude tells you they are wrong, ask him why he has not written a peer-reviewed paper on the matter. There is no conspiracy. In fact, scientists like to have contrary data and theories to debate and play with.

Now, I will give credit where credit is due, many conservatives have started to admit that global warming is real, but they claim that it would be too costly to our economy to make the necessary adjustments, and places like China and India are not going to do anything, so why should we. Basically, conservatives want a lemming suicide pact, a Thelma and Louise heading over the cliff together. So, let’s have a Guyana punch party, and just hope Jesus comes back before the Kool-Aid is served.

The thing is, it is going to be too costly not to transform our economy to meet this crisis. How many days of work will be lost because of winter storms? (For you people who believe that harsh winters prove that global warming is not real, please put down your crayon. Not every place is going to get hotter. Global warming actually alters weather patterns and makes them more severe. In some places, cold winters will actually get colder. Global warming means the overall temperature of the globe is warmer, not every location. So, don’t think you are going to make a fortune by investing in suntan oil in Iowa.)

How much will insurance companies have to payout in claims from accidents, floods, and other disasters? How many billions will be spent to save homes from out-of-control forest fires and coastlines erosion? (If you don’t think the taxpayer is going to foot the bill to save rich people’s homes, you are crazy). How much will it cost to improve our already taxed energy grid, with air conditioner usage increasing in the summer and furnaces fighting to keep the winter cold away? Cities and islands vanish? Roads wash out? Bridges are swept away? How much more will we spend on self-defense and environmental relief efforts? (The war in Rwanda has been called the first global warming war.) Then there are the costs that cannot be computed. Sportsmen unable to take their children out because entire species have disappeared and terrains changed.

Now it is one thing to disagree with ninety-eight mechanics. At worst, all it is going to cost you is a car. There are millions of automobiles out there to choose from. No big deal. Not listening to ninety-eight doctors? All it is going to cost you is your life. The world will go on without you. But, what if you are wrong when it comes to global warming, and all the scientists are right? Well, your children’s wings melt, and they disappear. Hubris. Oh, Icarus wings and that darn global warming thing.