Global Warming Controversy:
Follow the Money

blue marble

What's the global warming controversy about? In short, it's a fenderbender at the intersection of science and vested interests.

First, think about yourself, your fragile, warm, breathing body...and the cold hostility of outer space.

Here we are on the big blue submarine, whizzing through space lickety-split around a large, unmanned nuclear reactor.



The big blue submarine has the only life on it that we know about for sure in the whole darn universe...

...and it's kind of a mystery why we got so lucky, but we did.

Oh, sure, we know about the technically why now, in large part...

curvature of the earth
  • We're a perfectly balanced distance from the Sun;
  • not too much solar radiation, not too little;
  • Jupiter keeps the large meteors from hitting us by being so large and attractive and suitably far away so we don't have to get the news;
  • That big chunk taken out of the earth which became the moon and allowed us our wonderfully eccentric wobble and tilt also allowed for shifting plates, which makes atmosphere possible.

Amazing, right??

But wait...that's not all we've won!

  • We've got just enough CO2 to be warm, not so much that we're TOO warm;
  • We've got a wonderfully efficient carbon filter in the North Atlantic which works to stabilize the temperature (by absorbing excess CO2) in the rest of the world;
  • We've got glaciers to reflect back the sun's heat and keep it from frying us;
  • We've got upper atmosphere ozone to keep the sun's ultraviolet rays from turning us all into raisins;


In other words...

family in the snow

...just enough of everything, just where we need it.

Sounds like we got the winning lottery ticket in the universe, doesn't it?

Now, add to this happy accident that we're incredibly DELICATE creatures...

Our bodies maintain their heat at about 98 and a half degrees Fahrenheit all the time. If this varies by five degrees either way, we're in BIG TROUBLE. So we like to live in places that don't require too much work to stay at 98 degrees, don't we?

For example, more of us prefer to live in San Diego than Nome, Alaska; )

If the whole world was 104 degrees F in the summertime and -20 degrees F in the winter, quite a few of us wouldn't survive.


Science and Vested Interests

From an article on climate change denial by Shawn Lawrence Otto, the author of "Fool Me Twice: Fighting the Assault on Science in America":

...science is always political. That is because whenever it creates new knowledge, that knowledge either confirms or challenges somebody's vested interests -- and those vested interests fight back.


Who would be most likely to survive? The wealthy, of course!

The same people who are funding the climate change denier research.

They could crank up the air conditioning in the summer, the heat during the winter; it would cost more, but they could afford it. They're the least worried about global warming because they figure they'll be okay on their private property, no matter what. Their bases are covered, even if they're proven wrong over time.

Having said that...do you think even the wealthy are going to be happy on a polluted, flooded, storm-ridden SWAMP?

We're all on this big blue submarine together, for better or worse.


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