Tulips

It’s finally spring—at least I think so. For a few days, it was unseasonably warm, then unseasonably cool, and then unseasonably windy, and by the time this goes to press, it will have been unseasonably everything all over again. Is our crazy weather due to global warming, or to the mercurial nature of things? No one knows, least of all the tulips.

Some of them have stuck their heads out already, and their baked, then frozen, then wind-battered petals testify to their pluck. Others have cautiously waited until more hospitable conditions. If I were a tulip, I would be in the latter group, but thankfully, I am not.

• • •

The other day at a cocktail party, I was talking to a guy who is CEO of a wind-power company in California. “It’s great to know that someone can make a living doing something that’s good for the environment,” I said to him, deciding not to mention the threat that wind turbines pose to birds. He agreed both that a living could be made, and that this was good. (Someone later told me that this guy made eight million dollars last year.) “But,” he said, to make sure I had all the facts at my disposal, “I don’t believe in some of the science behind global warming.”

“How about pollution?” I asked. “Do you believe in that?”

He excused himself and made beeline for the bar.

My friend whose party it was commended me afterward for not getting in a big argument with Wind Guy about global warming. (I decided not to tell her that it was not my self-control that prevented it but his hasty exit.) Later, though, I found myself wishing I had chased after him and asked him some tough questions, as his words kept replaying in my mind, with varied emphases: “I don’t believe in some of the science behind global warming,” or “I don’t believe in some of the science behind global warming” or even “I don’t believe in some of the...” Etc.

Was he questioning some of the particular studies that critics of global warming cite? Was he questioning the value of science itself? Or was he suggesting that he as an individual had the right to believe anything he wanted, including, as Lewis Carroll put it, six impossible things before breakfast?

It later occurred to me that maybe he was simply repeating a pre-packaged phrase he had heard somewhere, perhaps on Fox News. This seemed likely, so I Googled it and found this sentence: “Bush administration officials continue to question some of the science behind global warming.”1 Bingo!

Still another source was implicated by Google: Michael Crichton, author of Jurassic Park, whose challenges to scientific assertions about global warming have been embraced by, among others, Bush, who not only allegedly “avidly read” Crichton’s anti-global-warming-science novel State of Fear but invited its author to the White House for a chat, presumably about environmental matters.2

My guess is that Wind Guy is a Crichton fan and that his views on “the science behind global warming” did not come from hours in the Stanford University library but from some Republican message machine. In State of Fear, Crichton attempts to cast doubt on global warming theory, coming up with alternative explanations for climate change, and suggesting that recent concern about global warming is a fad—something like the seventeenth-century Dutch tulip craze.3 (At least, I think that’s what he suggests; I’m certainly not going to read his novel and find out.) Brookings analyst David B. Sandalow examines these accusations in “Michael Crichton and Global Warming”4 and demolishes most of Crichton’s argument (if you can call a novel an argument). However, he concedes that “there are fewer people who have sorted through the minutiae of climate change science than have opinions on the subject.”
Have all of us who are sweating bullets about global warming—I include myself—researched “some of the science behind” it more thoroughly than Wind Guy has? Perhaps not. Should we? Maybe.

But what would be even more convenient for us is if scientists were allowed to do their jobs. In February of 2004, more than sixty scientists, including Nobel laureates, signed a statement, “Restoring Scientific Integrity in Policymaking,” asking that the Bush administration stop meddling with scientific inquiry by, for example, suppressing studies that contradict the findings they would prefer.5 In January, Congress reported survey results indicating that “46 percent [of federal scientists surveyed] felt pressure to eliminate the words ‘climate change,’ ‘global warming’ or similar terms from communications about their work.” Furthermore, “The scientists also reported 435 instances of political interference in their work over the past five years.”6

The continuous obfuscation of facts by the Bush administration makes it extremely difficult to do anything but jump on a bandwagon, since no other vehicles are available in our public discourse. All we have are media crazes that come and go at dizzying speed, often, some cynics have suggested, timed by the Bush message machine to drive other subjects off the front page.

* * *

As I was writing this, the Virginia Tech school shootings, which the media has been referring to as a “massacre,” burst into our awareness, and now all media outlets are devoting all their resources to profiles of the gunman and his victims, heart-breaking statements from survivors and from families of victims, and speculations on how the tragedy might have been averted. Any attempts to suggest that Virginia’s absurdly lax gun control laws might have contributed to the situation have been met with outrage on the part of NRA-driven rightwing mouthpieces, some of whom have taken this opportunity to suggest that if only students at VT had been permitted to carry concealed weapons, none of this would have happened. It seems far more likely to me that if students were allowed to carry weapons to school, concealed or otherwise, things like this would happen constantly. If you don’t believe me, you need to visit my Mythology class during a round of “Odyssey Jeopardy.”

There’s no doubt that the VT tragedy was horrific, and it is heart-wrenching to see smiling photographs of all the people who lost their lives. For some reason, though, the media has decreed that we don’t get to see pictures of the 171 people who died yesterday in Iraq; there is no interactive feature on the New York Times’s web page where we can read more about each one of them. And if Dateline did a special report on each of the American soldiers who have been killed since Bush declared his mission accomplished (3173 as of today 7), I haven’t seen it. We did witness a flurry of attention to some of the 24,645 wounded, whose miserable plights were reported in The Washington Post in February, but that particular media storm seems to have abated.

• • •

In my back yard, in the cold and the wind, tulips wait patiently for spring while our weather and our times just keep getting weirder.

1 My italics. Esther Pan, “The G-8 Summit,” Council on Foreign Relations. June 30, 2005.

2 Michael Janofsky,
“Bush’s Chat with Novelist Alarms Environmentalists,” New York Times. February 19, 2006:

3 See Charles Mackay’s 1841 Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds. Several websites provide the entire work online; here’s one.

4 David B. Sandalow,“Michael Crichton and Global Warming," The Brookings Institution, January 28, 2005. Sandalow describes Crichton’s argument in the novel as “unpersuasive.”

5 “Restoring Scientific Integrity in Policymaking,” Union of Concerned Scientists, February 18, 2004.

6 See “Bush Administration in Hot Seat over Global Warming,” MSNBC, January 30, 2007.

7 www.antiwar.com/casualties

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