Fiddling While the Planet Burns

Source: Boulder Daily Camera
[Apr 17, 2006]

CORPUS CHRISTI, Texas — My friend, the entomologist, makes his living de-bugging the vast cotton fields of South Texas. Maybe not this year, though. Drought is jeopardizing the cotton crop, as well as the livelihoods of everyone connected to it. If rain doesn't come soon, there'll be little cotton, if any.

Drought in South Texas isn't unusual, but lately the weather has been peculiar in other ways. I grew up in Victoria, in the heart of the Texas Gulf Coast. It snowed there on February 12, 1958, and again, coincidentally, on February 12, 1960, a total accumulation of perhaps 3 inches. School ended early. And that was it for snow. But on Christmas Day, 2004, Victoria received a full 12 inches of snow, the first and only big snowfall since 1897. Peculiar.

Other things have changed, as well. This is hurricane country. Once hurricane season starts in June, most people maintain a wary watch on the tropics all summer and then breathe a grateful sigh of relief when the Gulf water begins to cool in October or November.

I detect more anxiety than usual this year. Last season exhausted the National Weather Service's annual list of hurricane names and went deep into the Greek alphabet before the last storm, Epsilon. Katrina was bad, but Rita hit closer to home, sidling past Corpus Christi, provoking several days of boarding-up and evacuations, before turning north and sparking a tense, bottle-necked exodus from the Houston area. Many of us know someone who was trapped on the road for a day and a night in the vast caravan fleeing Rita.

Warmer water means stronger hurricanes and probably more of them, as well as higher sea levels and other dramatic environmental alterations. And clearly the globe is getting warmer. That fact has been solidly documented in many books and magazines, including cover stories by Audubon (December 2003) and National Geographic (September 2004). A recent Time cover story (April 3) demonstrates very credibly that the fact of global warming is beyond dispute. Even the skeptics have to admit that.

But some skeptics continue to reject connections between global warming and human activity. As recently as March 20 on "Stephanopoulos," George Will supported the idea that the current warming trend is normal climate fluctuation. And on the

March 31 edition of Bill Maher's "Real Time," Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, R-Calif., thoroughly on-message, argued that the connection between human activity and global warming is still very much in dispute. Let's wait, he says, until all the facts are in.

However, the next time you're idling at a stoplight, consider the scene around you. At least half of the vehicles you see are enormous, SUVs and over-sized pickups. Most have only one or two persons inside. The guy in front of you is making his second trip of the day to the grocery store, three miles away, this time for bread. The guy behind you is driving four miles to the gym to work out.

All of the vehicles have one or two tailpipes blowing into the atmosphere a steady stream of hot exhaust, most of it made up of carbon. In fact, for every gallon of gasoline burned, five pounds of carbon are emitted, equivalent to a small bag of charcoal briquettes, enough to grill a couple of steaks.

Carbon particles are invisible, of course, but imagine the briquettes dropping steadily, one by one, from the tailpipes around you. In no time the roads would be filthy with them, and they would line the shoulders with small black ridges. Imagine the roads rutted in carbon, a black snow that won't melt.

Now, multiply the scene at the stoplight by the 250,000,000 vehicles on American roads, and then figure in the many, many millions more worldwide. Consider the vehicles that China and India will shortly produce, in emulation of our automobile-borne way of life. Don't even bother to think about the coal-burning power plants.

Imagining all this, the question probably isn't whether or not global warming exists. It's probably not even whether human activity contributes to it. The real question is why we have such a difficult time accepting the extreme likelihood that the ever-heavier human footprint on the planet has an effect on its temperature.

The refusal to acknowledge that great likelihood is to engage in one the most dangerous of all human behaviors: Denial.

John M. Crisp is a professor in the English Department at Del Mar College in Corpus Christi, Texas. E-mail jcrisp@delmar.edu.