Of course I believe in Global Warming. The debunkers are clunkers. Ask any polar bear. Measure the depth of the ice at the North Pole. Ask any victim of severe weather. Ask the Swedes and their neighbors the Finns about this year’s temperature rise. Check the ozone layer and the poisonous gases in the atmosphere. Check the summer weather in the eastern U.S. and the evenings that don’t cool. And look at the car companies and CEO’s willing to invest in green. It’s not because of the color. Check the asthma and allergy statistics. Take pity on Mother Earth, she’s ill and sending a clear message about her high fever.

Too many scientists make too strong a case for me or, I think, any sensible person not to believe there is Global Warming. One dissenter doesn’t mean very much given the very strong evidence that Global Warming is real. If you were told by 50 noted doctors that you had a disease that could be treated and the 5lst said it was bunk — What would you do? I think we know the answer. If we have any feeling for future generations, we mustn’t take the risk that one scientist is right and that the vast majority is wrong.

In 1994, there was a piece in the London Sunday Times that chilled my blood. Something called the Odden feature, described as a ‘tooth’ of ice protruding from the Greenland ice cover, which had forever dropped off every year into the sea and set the gulf stream going, had failed to drop for several years in a row. The Sunday Times surmised this could be a result of Global Warming, and that it might eventually lead to a slowing down of the Gulf Stream, which makes the regions north of the equator habitable. I stuck this story on the wall at French Vogue, where it had little effect on the fashion editors. As Global Warming became a more widespread and accepted emergency, I thought often about the Odden feature. Then I lived in New Mexico, where we had two years of horrifying drought. They have just had the wettest, snowiest winter in decades. The American winter has been the coldest in decades as well. A British scientist was reported last weekend to have said that Global Warming actually ended a decade ago. As usual, it is a fight between macro and micro perceptions. I believe that Global Warming exists and that Al Gore won the election in the year 2000, and we can’t do anything about any of it. No amount of unbleached toilet paper is going to change anything. This is the age of well meaning impotence.

The way we’re phrasing the question here seems to me revealing. Do we believe “in” Global Warming? One might be asked to believe “in” something transcendent, God, for instance, but I don’t think we should be asked to believe in specific scientific data points. They are either true or not true, and we should be able to judge them as true or not true. We shouldn’t be asked to believe in them. I think Global Warming has become a kind of faith unto itself, and a rather creepy one. It makes a lot of unreasonable demands on its members, such as: you have to swallow it whole. But why should we? So that’s my first point. My second is that the weather where I’ve lived most of my life, the northeast of the United States, has gotten balmier than it was when I was a kid. Winters seemed fiercer then, colder and snowier; summers were, I think, just about as hot. So this leaves me disposed to believe that things at least here are getting warmer. But it doesn’t answer the question: Why? I would turn for the answer to scientists, but so many of them have become so politicized on this question – whether they believe “in” or not, and they have joined the church of Global Warming or not. So one then tends to turn away a bit from the idea of quick scientific resolution, and hope the waves of politics will pass and in time scientists will get serious again and try to figure out honestly what’s happening, if anything. I am open to the idea that the earth’s weather is subject to natural variation in one direction or another as the centuries pass. Maybe that’s what did in the dinosaurs. I’m open to the idea that the way we live is having an impact on the weather. If this is true, and we can do something about it, and it would be beneficial to do something about it, then we should, no? But this should be demonstrated beyond a reasonable doubt before we go on a toot and, say, ban activities that may in the end turn out to be harmless. Our attitude should not be frantic and emotional (as it is in some quarters now) but honestly inquiring, and sober minded. You remember what the prime minister of China is said to have responded when Henry Kissinger asked him, in the 1970’s, how he viewed the French Revolution: “It’s too early to tell.” We could use a little more of that kind of deliberativeness in this area. I also wonder sometimes which is worse, Global Warming or Global Cooling. If the earth were everywhere getting colder that would be pretty serious, no? Everyone using up more energy to heat homes and factories? And I’ve wondered if we aren’t attempting to distract ourselves from problems in our immediate ken — problems in our immediate circle of contact, local problems — by fastening on this large global issue. It’s always easier to campaign to clean up the world than it is to clean up your block, or state, or your act. So that’s where I start.

We seem still to be deeply polarized over the issue of Global Warming. I’ve seen Al Gore’s movie, ‘An Inconvenient Truth’ and I’ve read the book. I continuously search websites that discuss the issue of Global Warming. Pro and Con. I’m not a scientist; however, something is causing migratory birds to be displaced during their journey; polar ice caps and important glaciers to melt and sea water to rise. Lakes are shrinking and so are coastal lines. I hear talk that water will be more valuable than oil and there will be a definite water shortage. In fact, I have a brilliant friend who has given up her very successful and innovative business to spend all her time developing methods of water reclamation and purification. Here in California, swimming pools are everywhere and I’ve just read on a Green site that a small pool (I’m remembering about 18 x 12 feet) without a cover will evaporate enough water in a year to provide drinking water for one human for 29 years.

Whatever the truth of Global Warming, (and I am much more inclined to believe those scientists and Vice President Gore who conclude there is such a thing and that it is caused largely by human activity and CO2 emissions) — recycling; conserving water, gasoline and electricity, switching from things non-recyclable to products and practices that are Green; supporting development of sustainable energy; becoming a vegetarian or just cutting back on beef; reducing pollution and toxins in any form can only be a good thing. Go online and browse through Green sites that can give us simple, practical ways to reduce our appetite for things harmful to our species and to our earth. People before profits.

One of my characters, Judith Beasley, middle American homemaker warns: “We all know that we are running short of our natural resources, but what about our unnatural resources? In one game show alone, ‘The Price is Right’ uses more plastic than the entire country of India has ever seen. If we don’t stop squandering and start conserving our unnatural resources, there will be an end to civilization as we know it.”

Like Gilbert and Sullivan
Who had on their list
The Piano-Organist
The one on my list
With whom I’m most pist
Is the Weatherman-Physicist
Who says global warming is bunk
And the science Gore wrote of is junk

Yes, I’ve got him on my list
The Weatherman-Physicist

I don’t say he’s telling us lies
I just think he’s not very wise
About what could happen
To flora and fauna
As our planet turns into a sauna
And polar bears suffer bi-polar bear depression
From all that sea ice in liquid recession
Mis-timed migrations, dead trees, bleached coral
To deny all this seems almost immoral

We’ve no place to run to — we’re running in place
As we sing a sad parody of ‘Amazing Disgrace’
Yes, I resist the Weatherman-Physicist

And I hope this will show up in the polls
For his premise is so chock full of holes
Not that I’m saying he’s dumb — like some
I just can’t help wondering what think tank he’s from

Yes, I believe in Global Warming and evolution, too.