Should you care about our oceans boiling away? Al Gore thinks you should not only care but you should also do something to prevent its happening.
Sorry to say, “I ain’t worried.” And I don’t worry because they won’t. As the Sun turns from an average star into a red giant about four or five billion years hence, it will engulf the planet. Being inside the Sun? Now, that’ll change climates and boil oceans! But right now? No, I ain’t worried.
Yes, coral reefs might die out—bleached as their zooxanthellae die in warmer waters—but they won’t necessarily go extinct; when higher latitude waters warm sufficiently to support coral growth, the polyps will thrive outside their current tropical range. Maybe the American Bight will house a new Great Barrier Reef off the Outer Banks. Imagine. Turquoise waters and carbonate sands lining the littoral zone of North Carolina. Scuba divers galore, bigger mansions on the beach, and glass-bottom boat tours for the swimming-challenged.
Al Gore delivered his recent tirade about inaction over climate change and about “boiling” oceans in Davos at the World Economic Forum. A bunch of people attended, in fact, so many attended that they needed more than 1,000 private flights to reach the conference. Those planes spewed emissions equivalent to emissions from 350,000 cars, according to Greenpeace. If people can’t see the hypocrisy of the attendees and the attendees of conferees at COP meetings in exotic places, then they are probably the attendees themselves. Just about everyone else notes the folly of flying to fun places to admonish the rest of us paeans who are guilty of crimes against the planet. “What do you mean,” confesses a paean, “all I did was drive the family to the shore for a week’s vacation”? To which Al replies, “Don’t you realize that the trip endangered all of us? Endangered the polar bears? Boiled the oceans?”
Al Gore’s hyperbole was delivered with the skill of a melodramatic actor. He was loud enough to project his voice to the back of an outdoor amphitheater in ancient Greece. The ancient comedic playwright Aristophanes could have used his talent. Gore, one of the elite boulai at Davos, employed hyperbole as an effective rhetorical mechanism that works when listeners are already emotionally involved. Unfortunately for Al, many of us aren’t so emotionally wrapped up in the urgency he proclaims. Maybe Gore should read Aristophanes’ The Knights, Acharnians, and The Frogs to discover the fate of the demagogue Hyperbolus.
With a little imagination, one can find parallels between Hyperbolus and Al Gore. Both can be accused of demagoguery. Derived from “people” (demos) and “leader” (agogos or agein, “to lead”), demagoguery implies manipulation, high emotion, and hyperbolic expression. That speech of Gore in Davos was demagoguery.
But as Hyperbolus discovered upon being ostracized, the “people” can take only so much demagoguery. Sure, the demagogue will get people’s undies bunched up for awhile, but eventually, bunched undies become uncomfortable even for the throng wearing biodegradable thongs. The only recourse demagogues have is more demagoguery and more hyperbole. Gore has become more shrill and has been joined by demonstrators equally as shrill and foolish. Ruining a famous painting does nothing for the environment and nothing to convince the “average” family to stay at home instead of going to the beach.
The “rain bombs” and boiling oceans Al Gore cites as evidence of climate change really aren’t new in the planet’s history. Records of floods go back many centuries, and, if we could go back to pre-human times, back millions, to hundreds of millions, to billions of years. Waters have warmed and cooled—once so cooled that much or all of the planet looked like Pluto. Continents have moved, oceans have spread wide and subsequently closed, currents have shifted, the orbit has reshaped itself, the planet’s poles have “wandered,” and the Sun has increased and decreased its radiation of the planet. And by the way, the composition of the atmosphere has changed, also.
Hyperbolus-Gore nothwithstanding, the atmosphere does seem to have warmed a bit since the fright of a “new” ice age that kicked off the practice of Earth Day. Warming might be good for some people in some places and bad for other people in other places. The histories of Viking expeditions during the Medieval Warm Period, pre-Columbian Mayan droughts, European Little Ice Age, and ancient flooding indicate that environments change even in the short term of days, to years, to hundreds of years.
Al is convinced that we’re headed for doom. Many in his retinue are also convinced of that scenario, and their undies are tightly bunched. So, they want us to spend our wealth keeping ourselves from being wealthy and healthy. They want us not to have what they have. What would happen to the planet, they worry, if we could all jet off to Davos to scream the way they do about how destructive humans are?
So just as there will be successive COP meetings, so the World Economic Forum will continue to meet, continue to fly in the wealthiest among us to some place like Davos instead of meeting by Zoom on their personal big smart TVs in their many-roomed mansions. They will fault us for what they do on an order of magnitude greater. You drive your little car; they fly their planes and sport about in SUVs and sports cars. You use a little electricity. They use enough to run a town.
And they preach and demagogue, all in melodramatic hyperbole. Time to run them out of town as the Athenians did to Hyperbolus. Time to tell them to lead by action and not by blaming us for what they do on economic steroids. But, of course, the people of Davos wouldn’t run them out of town. Their wealth helps keep the lights on. Their wealth makes the valley a successful tourist trap.
“Look Al, if you’re really serious, go home, dim the lights, and give us a call. Maybe we’ll listen to a rational talk backed by rational and productive action that doesn’t bankrupt the world and cast those who want what you have into a new Dark Age of poverty. Otherwise, just shut up. Most of us have unbunched and untwisted our undies after repeated unfilled predictions of dire consequences like “only eight years left,” “by 2020 the seas will destroy the cities,” “all the glaciers on Greenland and in the Himalayas will melt,” and other such erroneous prophecies. If sea level rises as it has been rising for the last 10,000 years, recognize that it’s our personal choice to build by the shore like Obama, who owns not one, but two seaside homes. But please, Al, no more conferences with happy conferees eating, drinking, and merry-making while decrying the wickedness of people who want what you have. Just shut up. We’ll pay the consequences of living where Nature deals occasional bad hands. Life on this planet is always a gamble. By the way, how many of your Davos colleagues visited Graubunden’s casino during the evenings of the conference? Nothing like a resort town’s amenities to fill the needs of the rich and powerful! Nothing like meeting in a heated building below alpine slopes covered in snow!”
Sorry to say, “I ain’t worried.” And I don’t worry because they won’t. As the Sun turns from an average star into a red giant about four or five billion years hence, it will engulf the planet. Being inside the Sun? Now, that’ll change climates and boil oceans! But right now? No, I ain’t worried.
Yes, coral reefs might die out—bleached as their zooxanthellae die in warmer waters—but they won’t necessarily go extinct; when higher latitude waters warm sufficiently to support coral growth, the polyps will thrive outside their current tropical range. Maybe the American Bight will house a new Great Barrier Reef off the Outer Banks. Imagine. Turquoise waters and carbonate sands lining the littoral zone of North Carolina. Scuba divers galore, bigger mansions on the beach, and glass-bottom boat tours for the swimming-challenged.
Al Gore delivered his recent tirade about inaction over climate change and about “boiling” oceans in Davos at the World Economic Forum. A bunch of people attended, in fact, so many attended that they needed more than 1,000 private flights to reach the conference. Those planes spewed emissions equivalent to emissions from 350,000 cars, according to Greenpeace. If people can’t see the hypocrisy of the attendees and the attendees of conferees at COP meetings in exotic places, then they are probably the attendees themselves. Just about everyone else notes the folly of flying to fun places to admonish the rest of us paeans who are guilty of crimes against the planet. “What do you mean,” confesses a paean, “all I did was drive the family to the shore for a week’s vacation”? To which Al replies, “Don’t you realize that the trip endangered all of us? Endangered the polar bears? Boiled the oceans?”
Al Gore’s hyperbole was delivered with the skill of a melodramatic actor. He was loud enough to project his voice to the back of an outdoor amphitheater in ancient Greece. The ancient comedic playwright Aristophanes could have used his talent. Gore, one of the elite boulai at Davos, employed hyperbole as an effective rhetorical mechanism that works when listeners are already emotionally involved. Unfortunately for Al, many of us aren’t so emotionally wrapped up in the urgency he proclaims. Maybe Gore should read Aristophanes’ The Knights, Acharnians, and The Frogs to discover the fate of the demagogue Hyperbolus.
With a little imagination, one can find parallels between Hyperbolus and Al Gore. Both can be accused of demagoguery. Derived from “people” (demos) and “leader” (agogos or agein, “to lead”), demagoguery implies manipulation, high emotion, and hyperbolic expression. That speech of Gore in Davos was demagoguery.
But as Hyperbolus discovered upon being ostracized, the “people” can take only so much demagoguery. Sure, the demagogue will get people’s undies bunched up for awhile, but eventually, bunched undies become uncomfortable even for the throng wearing biodegradable thongs. The only recourse demagogues have is more demagoguery and more hyperbole. Gore has become more shrill and has been joined by demonstrators equally as shrill and foolish. Ruining a famous painting does nothing for the environment and nothing to convince the “average” family to stay at home instead of going to the beach.
The “rain bombs” and boiling oceans Al Gore cites as evidence of climate change really aren’t new in the planet’s history. Records of floods go back many centuries, and, if we could go back to pre-human times, back millions, to hundreds of millions, to billions of years. Waters have warmed and cooled—once so cooled that much or all of the planet looked like Pluto. Continents have moved, oceans have spread wide and subsequently closed, currents have shifted, the orbit has reshaped itself, the planet’s poles have “wandered,” and the Sun has increased and decreased its radiation of the planet. And by the way, the composition of the atmosphere has changed, also.
Hyperbolus-Gore nothwithstanding, the atmosphere does seem to have warmed a bit since the fright of a “new” ice age that kicked off the practice of Earth Day. Warming might be good for some people in some places and bad for other people in other places. The histories of Viking expeditions during the Medieval Warm Period, pre-Columbian Mayan droughts, European Little Ice Age, and ancient flooding indicate that environments change even in the short term of days, to years, to hundreds of years.
Al is convinced that we’re headed for doom. Many in his retinue are also convinced of that scenario, and their undies are tightly bunched. So, they want us to spend our wealth keeping ourselves from being wealthy and healthy. They want us not to have what they have. What would happen to the planet, they worry, if we could all jet off to Davos to scream the way they do about how destructive humans are?
So just as there will be successive COP meetings, so the World Economic Forum will continue to meet, continue to fly in the wealthiest among us to some place like Davos instead of meeting by Zoom on their personal big smart TVs in their many-roomed mansions. They will fault us for what they do on an order of magnitude greater. You drive your little car; they fly their planes and sport about in SUVs and sports cars. You use a little electricity. They use enough to run a town.
And they preach and demagogue, all in melodramatic hyperbole. Time to run them out of town as the Athenians did to Hyperbolus. Time to tell them to lead by action and not by blaming us for what they do on economic steroids. But, of course, the people of Davos wouldn’t run them out of town. Their wealth helps keep the lights on. Their wealth makes the valley a successful tourist trap.
“Look Al, if you’re really serious, go home, dim the lights, and give us a call. Maybe we’ll listen to a rational talk backed by rational and productive action that doesn’t bankrupt the world and cast those who want what you have into a new Dark Age of poverty. Otherwise, just shut up. Most of us have unbunched and untwisted our undies after repeated unfilled predictions of dire consequences like “only eight years left,” “by 2020 the seas will destroy the cities,” “all the glaciers on Greenland and in the Himalayas will melt,” and other such erroneous prophecies. If sea level rises as it has been rising for the last 10,000 years, recognize that it’s our personal choice to build by the shore like Obama, who owns not one, but two seaside homes. But please, Al, no more conferences with happy conferees eating, drinking, and merry-making while decrying the wickedness of people who want what you have. Just shut up. We’ll pay the consequences of living where Nature deals occasional bad hands. Life on this planet is always a gamble. By the way, how many of your Davos colleagues visited Graubunden’s casino during the evenings of the conference? Nothing like a resort town’s amenities to fill the needs of the rich and powerful! Nothing like meeting in a heated building below alpine slopes covered in snow!”
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