I heard Al Gore speak on Monday. Judging from the bucket of letters commenting on Hilary Wade's column of two weeks ago, half of you just reached for your revolvers at that statement alone.
It's getting to the point where the cliches people have been trotting out about Gore are seeping into the collective consciousness far more than the actual science has, which is a pretty sad assessment for Gore's campaign.
The debate over Gore as a spokesman is banal for one reason: his arguments are backed by logic, a massive scientific consensus and strong evidence. What he's saying has a power and an appeal that overwhelms whomever it's communicated by.
At what point do we say enough is enough? When exactly do we sit up and ask some hard questions about the one planet we have? What does it take to get people to examine the essential logic of the modern American way of life?
Stop me if I'm boring you, but global warming is a fact. The "evidence" against global warming is as nonexistent as that for intelligent design. The skeptics and detractors are people who love the idea of greed-driven conspiracy theories and of scientific snobbery, or unscrupulous scientific whores who need to eat.
If the consensus of a massive worldwide scientific community is not enough to disprove the alternatives suggested by critics, then what is?
Gore's presentation was a tour de force in logic, science and reasoning, and I dare anyone who was there to tell me otherwise. More than anything, his message drove home the idea that global warming isn't just an "issue" - the very word denigrates it to a bulleted slot on the news page next to abortion, Iraq and all those other things the editorialists yammer on about - it's the issue.
Gore understands that the ecosystems of our planet are fragile, interconnected and codependent - if you mess one up, you mess them all up.
The rising levels of greenhouse gases raise global temperatures, melt ice reserves, raise water levels, increase ocean current convection, worsen tropical storms, allow bacterial microbes to flourish in places they never could've before, destroy permafrost, unbalance ocean salinity and cause floods, earthquakes, ecosystem invasions, droughts and extinctions.
In undeveloped countries, it drives millions of people from their coastal homes, dries up their freshwater supplies, sucks moisture from farmland soil and exposes them to unprecedented heat waves.
Our population is also exploding, meaning 9 billion people will walk the Earth in 2050.
Americans believe in democratic fairness; we want to hear all sides of an issue and decide "rationally" which is right. But science - in the unfortunate disparity that scientists and science writers everywhere must repeat forever - is not a democracy, but a meritocracy.
It's a simple matter of intellectual honesty: if you have an idea, you do everything possible to attack it and try to disprove it, and failure to disprove it will strongly suggest you're right.
Americans embrace ideas of "academic fairness" for their democratic connotations, but they wouldn't if they understood how science works. Hearing all sides of the issue as Wade suggested is important, but here it's completely beside the point. If someone questioned the theory of gravity, would you really want to hear all sides of it?
I hate to say this, because insulting people won't convince anyone of anything, but global warming skeptics can't see beyond the pale of the farts they take so much delight in igniting. If one compares the risks of ignoring global warming (global chaos and death) with the risks of acting on the problem (wasting money?), the crime of the skeptics is ultimately a terrible lack of imagination.
Regardless of what you think of Gore, his methods or his political party, his appeal is too strong to ignore. As he said on Monday night, the time has come to transcend political obligations to recognize the moral.
Reach the reporter at: matthew.neff@asu.edu.
