Random Discussions on Climate Disruption

When a flight I’m getting ready to board is cancelled for a mechanical issue, as happened yesterday, I try not to be angry, but to remain positive, and keep two things in mind:

• It’s better to be on the ground wishing you were in the sky than being in the sky wishing you were on the ground,

and

• Try to remain calm and relax.  Use the opportunity to read, or perhaps head to the bar for a beer, meet some people, and hope to have a couple of stimulating conversations.  In the worst cases, they’re good fodder for blog posts.   Most people have some level of interest in sustainability and clean energy; that makes for a good point of departure for a discussion.

Yesterday’s talks didn’t start off well.  I sat down next to a man and his wife, and began by letting the guy tell me about himself: college-graduate, extremely successful, semi-retired entrepreneur, sold his high-tech company to GE for a fortune (he calls them “Generous Electric”), lives on a golf course in (heavily Republican) Orange County, CA.

Here’s the interesting part:  he’s part of the dying breed of climate change deniers—especially rare among educated people.  But how well educated could he possibly be, I wondered, when he told me that there is an approximately equal balance of climate scientists who support and deny the theory (completely untrue—it’s 97-3), and that evidence against the concept includes the fact that people exhale CO2 (true, but shockingly irrelevant).

People with a super-weak command of logic scare me, though I don’t try to correct them; it’s a waste of my CO2-laden breath.