Day Four
It was 1970 or maybe 71. Fresh out of the Navy, newly married, I was attending the University of Houston on the GI Bill. I was majoring in literature for no other reason than I’d always wanted to go to college and study it. Literature. Books. Because I was a liberal arts major, I had to have some classes in the sciences. To help us along, they actually created a course affectionately known as kitchen physics, two semesters. Our textbook was comprised of copies of articles reprinted from the pages of Scientific American. I loved that class. I still have the reprints.
One of those articles was written by Gilbert Plass titled Carbon Dioxide and Climate. It was written in 1959 and it referenced work started in 1861 when British physicist John Tyndall first began talking about the role of carbon dioxide and climate. All of Plass’s predictions about our industrialized world and a warming climate have come true. Yet, there are still those who persist in denying the science, because it’s easy to deny science because sometimes science is hard to understand, although endless summers and category five hurricanes have made some people start to come around.
I remember being asked, in one discussion on the subject, if I believed in Global Warming. I said it wasn’t a question of believing. It was data. You could see the numbers. Then I came to realize that if you couldn’t understand the numbers, then science became like magic, and a subject of belief. Something akin to religion. And some politicians were smart enough to see that and use it to their advantage and officials in Florida even banned use of the term Global Warming because that’s how you make science go away. You don’t talk about it. I wonder how they’re doing this morning with Milton?