Gwobu Wabu

There is nothing so fine as a multi-layered reference. I will leave it up to you to figure out what multiple layers I'm referencing. But will it help for me to say that this is actually about Global Warming? I thought not.

It seems to me that we're all fighting about the wrong thing, at least as far as global warming is concerned. Since we fight about the wrong thing a lot, this should come as no surprise to anyone. But let me demonstrate my point.

For instance, suppose Earth, instead of getting warmer, was getting cooler. Lest you think this is a science-fiction scenario, remember that it's happened in the past (more frequently than global warming, at any rate) including in the past of the human species. There was a miniature ice age a few hundred years back. So suppose it was happening again.

We'd probably all fight about whether or not it was being caused by pollution. And since people seem happier when it's warmer, there would probably be a lot more people opposed to global cooling. But it would be bad; crops would fail, ports would freeze, and heating bills would go through the roof. And there we would be, sitting around fighting about what was causing it.

Or maybe, just maybe, if we thought it was really a natural phenomenon, we might try to think of ways to combat it, regardless of its causes. If it seemed like burning oil in bonfires throughout the world would make the world heat up again and save us from an ice age, we might do that. Certainly we would try our best to work against destruction, instead of sitting around debating causality. The fact that it was "natural" wouldn't make it any less dangerous. Asteroids and comets collide with Earth every once in a while, "naturally." That doesn't make them any more livable.

I'm not going to get into an argument with people who don't believe that Earth is heating up, because, quite frankly, they are morons. They also aren't fighting about causality; they don't believe there's any effect, which rules out a cause right off. But everyone else who is sitting around drafting resolutions about human causes or natural causes, to them I say, stop talking.

We need to worry about global warming whether or not it is entirely out of our hands (and I don't believe for a second that it is). If we can have huge amounts of money spent on developing plans for when a comet hits Earth, why can't we spend some money to work out how to stop global warming?

The problem, of course, is that people who think it's all "natural," don't believe that reducing pollution will affect it at all, which is why we need to argue. And unlike a comet, getting people to stop polluting has no immediate onrushing doom attached. It's quite possible that we can go on exactly as we are for quite some time before we completely destroy Earth, but it's going to get awfully unpleasant between now and doom.

Me, I like the cold, so if the tables were turned, there's a chance I might be on the side of people who believe that the ice age is a good thing. It's possible. But I like to eat too.