global warming warning

I want to tell you about a person named Johnny McAverage.

Our Johnny has an iPhone, a wireless network in his apartment, a Netflix subscription, a tablet and a laptop. He drives a leased hatchback and uses the Google nav on his phone to help him get around the big city he lives in when going to new destinations. His farming related job sees him flying to remote towns twice a month, for farm visits. His savings account is not impressive, and his credit record is clean.

Johnny is not particularly fussy about his diet, but he likes to keep it on the healthy side. So, he only has one coffee a day, in the morning, does not eat fat and keeps an eye on his sugar intake. He only has fizzy drinks on occasions.

Now, his teeth are not in the best shape and his dentist recommended he sees a specialist to get some much-needed work done. He was warned that anesthetic will be required, and an x-Ray scan will need to be repeated. On top of that, his last blood results were not the best, so his GP recommended he sees an endocrinologist to get confirmation of a potential thyroid condition.

Johnny finds these specialist visits rather cumbersome given that he is on an airplane more than four times a month and spends almost half his time in a different location, away from home. It is even more complicated given that his visits are weather related, and he needs to time them such as to avoid rain at destination.

Johnny’s political views hover around the central side of the spectrum and he is absolutely convinced that global warming is fiction, a conspiracy aimed at siphoning money away from the traditional businesses and certain areas of the world, rich in specific types of resources or economically developed.

A scientific community that supports and actively promotes the concept bears no weight for Johnny. If anything, it makes him even more suspicious.

You see, Johnny embodies the stereotypical paradox of the global warming skeptic. Here we have a person happy to use technology produced by scientists and engineers in state-of-the-art research and production facilities. He has absolutely no doubt that the GPS and the Google algorithms will help him get to his destination every time. He, much like most of us, has no second thoughts about getting on a plane to go somewhere, thus giving an unquestionable vote of confidence to the specialists who designed, built, maintain and operate the aircraft. He implicitly trusts them with his life. Just as well, there is no question about the dentist’s statement based on the interpretation of an x-Ray scan, and zero doubt about the need to see an endocrinologist, whom he will also implicitly trust and go on and follow the prescribed treatment to the letter. Furthermore, Johnny trusts enough the unknown meteorologists making the forecasts on his weather apps to book his work travel based on their projections. Granted, they do not always get it right, but he’s now down to a couple of apps who are right almost every time. Say, around 95% of the time.

I could continue like this for quite a while, but you get the picture. Johnny is no different from any of us. We use technology in every single aspect of our life, we rely and surrender ourselves and our well-being to products, machinery and technology we know very little about and we understand even less. All of which are product of the work of countless scientists and specialists everywhere.

Yet, when the same scientists and specialists tell us that global warming is real, is happening and is going to be potentially catastrophic… everything changes. Suddenly the trust is gone, they are wrong, have no clue about what they are saying, make baseless statements, and we would rather believe this or that person feeding our doubt from behind rather (most of the times) transparent agendas.

It does not make sense that we trust science, scientists and specialists in every single aspect of our life, from medicine, nutrition, information technology, construction, communications, transport, weather forecast, etc. yet we do not trust them on the singular issue of global warming. From this perspective, it beggars belief that there even is a debate on the topic…

Interestingly, many of us take the word of naysayer politicians or politically appointed acolytes over that of scientists, particularly when the two camps preach different gospels. Human nature maybe?

The issue is that the truth remains… well, true, whether we choose to believe it or not…

Bottom-line, my vote of confidence goes to the scientists.