I met my alter ego, Foley, while placing a box of oatmeal in
my shopping cart. “Crummy weather,” he
noted. This was our nineteenth day of
rain, snow, slush, or grey clouds as the winter was beginning to yield its grip
in southern Indiana. I told him, “It’s
likely due to the global warming that is causing more frequent extreme weather
than in the past.” “I don’t think so,”
Foley came back, “I heard on Fox News that global warming is a liberal
myth. Weather is constantly changing. There
was no Industrial Revolution during the Ice Ages.” Foley felt he had me there. I told him that “The Ice Ages were due to the
wobble of the earth as it shifted its axis every 24,000 years. The current climate change is due to green
house gases, especially carbon dioxide from fossil fuels.”
Foley was not impressed. He claimed the earth was pretty
big. “You could pack all of humanity in a container that is about two miles in height,
width, and length. Whatever humans do,
earth will repair itself. That’s what nature or Providence does.” Foley went on to explain that after the
biblical flood that wiped out most of humanity, God promised he wouldn’t do a punishment
like that again. “Either way, God or nature, we are protected.” I was not reassured.
“Nature showed its stuff in 1815 when Mount Tambora in
Indonesia erupted. It was a bigger blast
than Krakatoa in 1883. So much volcanic
gas and dust was emitted that crops failed in temperate zones because of global
cooling. The year 1816 was called the year without a summer.” Foley scoffed, “How can you have global cooling
if you are dumping all that gas into the atmosphere?” I told him that in those gaseous discharges
was millions of tons of vaporized lava that dimmed the sunlight for two
years. “It was great for artists
painting spectacular sunsets,” I told Foley, “but it led to a massive
immigration of Germans to the United States after their crops failed.”
Foley scoffed. “Nature can do spectacular things but humans
can’t. It’s arrogance to think we’re
that significant in changing the earth.”
I told Foley to look at some satellite photos of earth at night. “You’ll see the industrialized countries lit
up like the US, lower Canada, coastal regions of Australia, Asia, and most of Europe,
but dark areas for central Africa, central South America, Greenland, Siberia, or the
polar regions.”
We made little headway discussing what we should do about climate
change and global warming. “Do nothing,”
reassured Foley. “Do you think industries want to go out of business by drowning
our coastal cities or turning the southeast into a huge desert? The invisible hand of capitalism has worked
in the past and it will work in the future. Why should they spend sums of money
on a problem that doesn’t exist?”
“What would convince you”, I asked?
“When I hear it on Fox News.” Foley smiled as he rolled his
cart to the checkout aisle.
