My View of the Matter

(c) 2010 by Barton Paul Levenson

After

• studying planetary astronomy since 1973,
• taking courses in it from Joost Kiewiet de Jonge at Pitt,
• getting a degree in physics, and
• spending twelve years writing radiative-convective models of planetary atmospheres...

...the following is

A Succinct Summary of My Beliefs about Global Warming.

1. Global warming is real.

2. It is caused mainly by human burning of fossil fuels.

3. It is the biggest threat human civilization has ever faced outside of nuclear war.

4. Anybody who disagrees with points 1-3 is either badly misinformed, lying, or deranged.

Make no mistake, global warming denial is pseudoscience. It falls into the same intellectual category as believing aliens built the pyramids, the Earth is 6,000 years old, or Apollo 11 never landed on the Moon. The big difference is, if you think your sun sign determines your personality or something in the Bermuda Triangle eats ships and airplanes, it only hurts you. If you think we should block any action to deal with global warming, it affects the whole human race.

I like civilization. I like knowing that there's always food available at the grocery store. I like flush toilets and air conditioned homes. I like the internet. I love my computer. Oh, and the only reason I remain alive is because of high-tech medicine.

And I will be damned if I will let a bunch of right-wing morons who couldn't write the equation of radiative transfer if their lives depended on it bring it all down.

I'm 50 years old as I write this in July 2010, and probably won't live to see the worst consequences of global warming. But my six-year-old niece Margo probably will. When she's forty years old, I don't want her to have to survive by shooting it out with the neighbors over who gets the tomatoes growing next to an outhouse.

I'll fight the deniers as hard as I have to to prevent that from happening.