My dad and I don't see eye to eye politically. In fact, I'm pretty sure he's not looking at eyes, he's looking at balls or something nether organ and pretending that it's the ocular organ. Regardless, I love him just the same. I also don't mind some good political banter now and then. While I see it as somewhat a game, I think he's trying to place me in his own personal interview-esque "gotcha" moment.
This happens about once per week.
Today's was, "so, did you hear about the big global warming scandal?"
His position on global warming is that it doesn't exist and it's made up by liberals. I can smell his victory speech heating up to 350 degrees in his brain-oven.
"No, I didn't. Tell me about that."
He knows by now that if the sentence starts with, or involves, "well I was watching Fox..." then I'm going to tell him to stop so that I may go do my own research, then return to the conversation when some non-Fox information has been dug up (by me).
"Well it was all over the news, the WSJ, NBC, everywhere."
No mention of FoxNews yet. Nor would there be.
"Apparently some hacker, or maybe it was an inside job, got all these emails from East Anglia University in England and the University of Pennsylvania regarding the UN's global warming research. They reveal that a lot of the data is doctored to show that global warming is more real than it really is."
So I took to the mighty Google to find these emails and any information about this. This is quite interesting and I certainly want to know if it is true.
I found this very telling article from the WSJ. Click here.
He listened as I mumbled through the article with half syllables, to indicate that I was reading.
"Sad, isn't it?" He said. "So many scientists careers will be destroyed by this."
That, I cannot argue with him about. In a time in which we so badly need scientific minds, we didn't need them to be doctoring information. We didn't need them to be enhancing graphs in places that didn't fit the hypothesis. We didn't need them to prove a case for the UN or Senate or whomever, when there wasn't one.
But what if this is still wrong and global warming is still real?
Frankly, my dear Wall Street Journal, I don't give a damn. Global warming, as a household phrase and phenomenon, has served as the means to a much better end: the yearning to become more energy efficient.
Regardless of whether or not global warming exists, because we can increase fuel and energy efficiency, we should. We have the technology dammit! We have the means! We have the knowledge! Our lives can be so much better! I'd love to go out for a dewy morning walk in the winter in Los Angeles without wondering if I should lick my lips or not because they've got a bit of mist on them, but what, might that mist contain? Hmm, that, well that's a bit frightening when I look out my office window to see a haze covering the little valley my apartment sits in. Hey, apartment, I hope there isn't a hole in the roof from all this shit withering it away. My renter's insurance doesn't cover that.
Something is afoot. Whether or not we should call it global warming, I don't know. Post-industrial revolution, what we've done to this planet is far from coddling or nurturing. We have completely pillaged it and there is so much more to come.
We can create electric cars. We can use solar power. We can use wind power. We can recycle water (and Los Angeles does). We can use less space. We can live in urban areas and not commute from the suburbs. Sadly, global warming may have been the fright trigger to get the general populous to start to take these technologies into their daily lives. Without global warming, myth or reality, we would not have even tried many of these things. Sometimes it takes belief in a God to turn a nasty selfish human into a decent one. Maybe global warming was needed to turn an energy gluttonous race into an energy conscious one.
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