gracchusdixit

Republican Presidential hopeful Jeb Bush recently accused our current President of “intellectual arrogance,” because he dared to say that the reality and causes of climate change are now “settled science”.  Bush insisted that the science on climate change is “convoluted” and complained that the arrogance of those who think otherwise means that “now you can’t have a conversation about it, even”.

It is hard to imagine what sort of “conversation” he has in mind, since it is the thinking of Mr. Bush himself and others like him that is convoluted and arrogant.  Against all evidence, such people continue to deny the facts.  Against all reason, they persist in placating or pandering to the flat-earth society that passes for today’s Republican Party.  In the face of looming ecological catastrophe, they delay, deny, and want us to do nothing.

In the most literal sense, of course, the science on climate change isn’t “settled” and never will be.  Science never stops challenging settled propositions.  It never stops questioning and revising, testing and adapting.  That is what science and scientists do, and that is how scientific knowledge advances.  Scientific knowledge deals in probabilities, rarely in certainties.

There comes a time, however, when the probabilities become so overwhelmingly certain that further doubt and discussion are a waste of precious time.  On the question of climate change, that time arrived long ago.  We and other nations agreed to begin limiting the production of greenhouse gases in 1992.  Since then, we have done next to nothing, and the time that remains to us is not only precious but running out.

We are in the midst of what will very likely be the hottest year ever recorded.  Historic droughts are bedeviling California as well as much of the Middle East, where ecological catastrophe has played a major, though largely ignored, role in creating the chaos that is tearing Syria and Iraq apart.  Hurricanes Katrina and Sandy were much worse than they might have been, because sea levels are a foot higher than they were a century ago and will soon become a good deal higher than that.  Houston, situated in a swamp very close to sea level, was just inundated by the worst flooding in its history.  Just weeks before, Eastern Australia was hit by a cyclone of titanic proportions, killing five people and causing billions of dollars in property damage, all the while Western Australia is withering under waterless skies.  Such extreme, violent and “abnormal” weather events are precisely what climate scientists have been predicting for two decades.

The problem is that nations like ours seem incapable of planning for such abnormalities, either politically or economically.  To the extent we plan at all, we plan for what we imagine to be normal, rolling with the punches when something out of the ordinary happens, when events fall outside the “bell curve” of what we have come to expect.  But what happens when the natural world no longer behaves as we expect, when the “bell curve” no longer applies, when previously abnormal events for which we are utterly unprepared occur, not once in a hundred years, but every year?

Imagine a world in which agricultural production in California, which supplies most of the fruit and vegetables we consume, collapses.  Imagine a world in which all of Florida south of Lake Okeechobee is reclaimed by the sea, and the city of Miami simply disappears.  Imagine a world in which New York City south of Houston Street is underwater, the New York subway system turns into one long, permanent sewer, and the millions of rats that lurk there now move up onto the streets.  Imagine a world in which half of Africa turns into uninhabitable desert, and three hundred million desperate refugees scatter in every direction looking for food, water, and land.

These are not fantasies.  They are not even unlikely.  What is unlikely is that measures to prevent or prepare for such looming catastrophes would ever come up in the “conversation” Jeb Bush pretends to long for.  That would require Bush and his ilk to end their convenient evasions and confront reality.

By all accounts, Jeb Bush is a man with a brain.  If that is the case, then he is also a supremely arrogant one, for he has decided not to use it, choosing instead to subordinate his intellect to political gain.  Because of such arrogance, we are all of us going to pay a high price.  Around the world, millions already are.