We Want to Believe

THIRTY SEVEN PERCENT, or something like that, of the american people do not believe in global warming. In other words, nearly three out of ten americans deny the obvious reality of the irrefutable presence of global warming and consequent climate change.

People tend, as we know, to believe what they want to believe. Otherwise billions of people wouldn't believe that god speaks to us in books and stories, or that god sits in judgment of creatures of his own creation, first making it irrestistably tempting to sin, then requiring the brutal torture and death of his own son to atone for the very sins made possible, available, and tempting...by god.

Carl Sagan pointed out that there is no shortage of intelligence in the land, but a severe shortage of education. High school chemistry would be a good place to start. Do the deniers of global warming accept the fact that millions of tons of carbon compounds are being injected into earth's atmosphere each year by industrial activity? Surely not, but who knows.

Perhaps the problem adheres in a lack of understanding of the chemical properties of the chemical "carbon", which, with a full set of two electrons attached to its nucleas, then six more electrons just beyond, in the second layer, seeks ceaselessly to unite with the element oxygen, and seeks to retain heat, naturally.

So, with all this carbon and the oxygen attached to it, "carbon dioxide", the heat which would otherwise readiate back into space from the earth's surface instead is lapped up by CO2, in the form of infrared radiation.

Its simple, straightforward, easily demonstrable science, and its amazing only in that we did not understand and accept if before, like, early in the industrial revolution. But we believe what we want to believe.

Oh, that the global warming deniers were correct, and that we could do whatever we want and get away with it, without repurcussions. Somewhere there may be a universe where this happens, but not here, not on this planet of chemistry, and carbon, and heat.