Polar Ice Caps & Galileo

by Deb Powers

 Arctic ice got smaller, thinner, younger this year, proclaimed National Geographic back in April. Last week, the Obama adminisration released photos of Arctic ice and glaciers that had been taken by satellites over the past ten years. As pointed out by Jeff McMahon at Scorched Earth Blog, the photos didn't raise many eyebrows until about ten days later when they were picked up by the UK newspaper The Guardian, with the somewhat sensationalized headline Revealed: the secret evidence of global warming Bush tried to hide.

Now, in all fairness, Bush didn't exactly try to hide the photos. The photos were taken by U.S. spy satellites, and it's typical for spy satellite photos to be classified. After all, no one really expects that any nation is going to wave around picturest that were taken by their nifty handy-cams. There is a U.S. law, however, that allows scientists to request the declassification of photos that may help in our understanding of the Earth and the environment - among other things - and a request was put in to the Obama administration for release of photos taken of the Arctic region over the last ten years. The photos were released, along with several posters which can be found at the Global Fiducials Library.

The photos are startling - which of course, has raised the expected brouhaha from global warming skeptics that the photos were cherry-picked to release only those that show support for the global warming "theory". The hue and cry in comments on green blogs is almost comical - one person actually used the television shows "The Deadliest Catch" and "Ice Road Truckers", asking how these satellite photos squared with all the ice that you see on those shows. I say "almost comical" because I find it hard to laugh at people who are actively trying to derail efforts to save the planet.

Global Warming skeptics are not Galileo

The funniest part of the whole "global warming is a myth" movement, though, has got to be the dearly held comparison by the global warming skeptics of the controversy to the trial of Galileo, with themselves heroically cast in the role of the intrepid, independent thinking Galileo facing down the entrenched beliefs of the established authorities - the Church. In fact, Galileo's discovery challenged not just the Church, but an entrenched belief among the people that had existed for thousands of years - that the Earth stands still as a fixed point in the center of the universe, and the sun revolves around it.

By contrast, the global warming theory has not been an accepted fact for generations. It is, quite literally, upstart science, only a few decades in existence. And while we like to imagine that power lies in the hands of the government, the real Goliaths are those that make big money on keeping things as they are. Those Goliaths - oil and gas companies, power companies, coal companies, most large industries - will not be well-served if it is commonly believed that their activities are helping to change the planet in a way that will make it uninhabitable for us in a few centuries.

Who profits from global warming?

And therein lies the rub. Changing the status quo will cut into the profits made by the real establishment - the indutrial complex. Thus, any challenge to the status quo must be met with denial - denial of the science, denial of the effects, denial of the cause. If the science is wrong, then we don't need to do anything because nothing is really happening. If the effects aren't real - if, for example, the effects are being greatly exaggerated by cherry-picking - then we don't have to change anything, because nothing is really happening. If the cause is not man-made, then nothing we can do will make any difference, so what we should be doing instead is figuring out ways to adapt to a heating planet - like finding more fuel oil and making our homes tighter so that we can keep them cooler as the Earth outside fries.

 These are the same people who tried to argue that water pollution was a figment of the collective imagination in the 1970s, and fought any sort of regulation that forced them to clean up the toxic spew they poured into the waters. They argued there was no proof that these chemicals caused algae to choke the waterways and kill the fish and other water creatures. They argued that the water life would adapt to it, and that man had a right to pollute because it cost too much money not to pollute. When all else failed, they argued that the measures they were required by law to take wouldn't change anything because the damage was already done - and fought every effort to make them responsible for the damage that they've caused.

Far from being Galileo, the global warming skeptics are powered by the same forces that have tried to block every effort to rehabilitate the Earth for over 100 years - the industrial complex protecting its profits like the endangered polar bear protects its cubs. If you doubt it, figure out who actually profits if global warming is proved false - and then figure out who profits and where the money goes if we attempt to curb it.