Some of my views on environmental issues tend to vex my liberal treehugger friends, and cause my more conservative friends to chuckle, thinking that I’m somehow “on their side”. At the heart of this occasional confusion between me and my friends is the issue of the nearly-useless term “global warming”. I say “nearly-useless” because the term has become so politicized as to be rendered devoid of any clear meaning. This little rift became apparent recently when a liberal friend shared the startling image at left, which shows the arctic sea ice at the north pole over nearly thirty years, from September 1979 to September 2007. As you can see, there’s been a rather shocking loss of arctic sea ice! Things like this are the most obvious irrefutable evidence that the Earth is getting warmer, and one can only conclude that someone who claims otherwise has either not done their research, or is an utter moron. Or of course, a liar with vested interests. What got my friends going recently was the fact that I said I wouldn’t mind some global warming if it ended winters in Michigan, because then I would not only not have to move, but Michigan’s sputtering economy could enjoy explosive revenue growth from its hundreds of miles of suddenly-warm-enough beaches. Adding that the Earth is going to warm up someday anyway, so it might as well be now. This little bit of semi-serious humor started a debate that went on for some time, mostly because someone used the term “global warming”. Someone whom I must hasten to remind you was not me. You see, I’m not convinced that the industrial revolution and the last century’s air pollution are the only cause of the Earth warming up. We had an ice age without man-made pollution, and the planet has gone through plenty of other dramatic changes without the help of the combustion engine and coal-generated electricity. But that doesn’t mean I don’t think that the energy or motor industries shouldn’t be heavily regulated to control emissions. In my opinion the big mistake on this topic was a political one, when Democrats made this a key issue, and branded  it as “global warming”. Which then gave industry a handy language mechanism to fight being regulated. As in this New American piece that references a lot of honest science but then crumbles through logical fallacy to conclude with the bizarre statement that the “intent of global-warming alarmists is to set up an energy-regulating global government and an international carbon-trading market worth billions”. Absolute facts on the broader topic of what’s causing the recent rise in temperature are not likely to be obtainable; even many scientists will admit this. In spite of the Union of Concerned Scientists solid stance that man is directly responsible for current global climate trends, the fact is that when you ask a larger group of scientists, their answers – although in agreement that man has some influence – will depend on whether they’re meteorologists, climatologists, or geologists, and so on.  But when you say “greenhouse gas emissions cause global warming so we should regulate them”, you’re sunk. Because then the argument is no longer about whether industry should stop dumping pollutants into our air because it’s just plain stupid, and bad for our air, it becomes about whether or not it causes “global warming”. Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for the “survival of the fittest” underpinnings of capitalism, until “the fittest” becomes an absolute monopoly, as in the case of energy companies and oil cartels. Because organisms as large as BP – or even Microsoft, Google, or NewsCorp – become less like a healthy part of an economic ecosystem and more like an Ebola virus that doesn’t care if it kills its host. And in this case, the host is you and me, and the air we breathe. Maybe we should stop trying to regulate greenhouse gas emissions because they cause global warming and start regulating them simply because cleaner industry simply makes sense.

Source of both images: EPA.Gov Slideshow