We All Like To Think We’re Smart…Until That’s Proven Not To Be the Case

Though I try to go through each day of research, writing, emails and phone calls with a mixture of boyish optimism and the aplomb that accompanies age, I sometimes catch myself being downright angry.  Why is the U.S. so regressive and stupid when it comes to environmental matters?  How is it possible that almost 40% of American voters still think Trump is doing a good job? 

Occasionally, a glimmer of truth comes through–a thin beam of light that explains all this. Here’s a story in today’s news from my home state, the one named for (Quaker, pacifist, educator and statesman) William Penn, that begins: Hundreds of faithful at a Pennsylvania church on Wednesday carried AR-15-style rifles in adherence to their belief that a “rod of iron” mentioned in the Bible refers to the type of weapon that was used in last month’s mass shooting in Parkland, Fla. (see photo above)

I live among people who worship weapons of war.

And I’m angry, I’m actually seething, that these same people don’t get their wits wrapped around global warming; they’re unconcerned that scientists have pieced together a record of Earth’s climate, dating back hundreds of thousands of years (and, in some cases, millions or hundreds of millions of years), by analyzing a number of indirect measures of climate such as ice cores, tree rings, glacier lengths, pollen remains, and ocean sediments, and by studying changes in Earth’s orbit around the sun.  They don’t get that Milankovitch cycles, the three cyclical movements related to the Earth’s orbit around the Sun (eccentricity, axial tilt, and precession) have been ruled out as possible causes.

Who’s the bigger idiot here?