The seventh and deciding game of the National League Championship Series is tonight. It’s hard for me not to be a baseball fan at this time of year, but my enthusiasm throughout the summer is not as sharp as it once was and the reason is steroids.
Baseball players (and other athletes) have been using performance-enhancing drugs for over 30 years. Jim Bouton wrote all this down in 1969, but we pretended to ignore it; the ballpark was a place to get away from our troubles, not add to them.
The players, the owners, the fans all pretended the problem didn’t exist, so it got worse. We all wanted more home runs, more no-hitters, more stolen bases, more broken records and we didn’t care too much about asking how they happened. For the players and owners, all this meant more money and fame. Who would want to face the facts when turning one’s head away was so easy and so profitable?
So, here I am, a middle-aged baseball fan whose sport has turned to ashes in my mouth, because I – and everyone else – spent too many years not wanting to know the truth, or act on it. So what? Big deal, there are worse things in life. That’s exactly the point.
I was watching the Detroit Tigers complete their sweep of the Oakland A’s last week, brooding on years of steroid denial and realized that the same pattern of comforting denial we apply to sports, we also apply to global warming.
I had been speaking with colleagues earlier that day, about James Hansen, director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies. Dr. Hansen says we have ten years left to take drastic action before it will be too late to stop the runaway effects of global warming.
My colleagues were excited about the prospect if a new Congress in January and a new administration in 2009, as if a slightly altered political landscape will result in a 180-degree shift in policy. I pushed back, arguing that even if the right mechanisms are put in place, the sense of urgency we feel is not shared by the general public. It’s certainly not shared by those oil and auto executives who have been working for 25 years to get to the place where they can pull down the big payoff. Did my friends really think those men would forego their loot for the good of the planet?
“As the science shows the accelerating effects of global warming, it will drive change,” one responded. Really? What kind of science? Like studying the effects of a storm that wipes out a major American city, leaving bodies floating in the street? America had that wake-up call. We hit the “snooze” button.
The fact is, taking appropriate steps to stop global warming – if such steps are even still available to us – will cause massive economic disruption. Of course, not taking these steps will cause even worse economic disruption (not to mention ecological disruption), but my sense of our political and business leaders is that none of them have the courage to take an unpopular position, even if it means the salvation of society.
What do you do if you’re a climate scientist and your best professional opinion is that it’s too late already to stop global warming? Do you go public with that? Probably not. People would either disbelieve and call you nuts or believe and do nothing to stop pumping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. So you lie. Your public statement is that we’re very close to running out of time and that we have to act now.
It’s a reasonable strategy, because climate science is imprecise at best and there’s much we don’t know. Even our best science is to some extent a lie, because we know it’s not completely accurate, so I think climate scientists decide to tell the lie that they hope will do the most good.
But here’s the thing about climate scientists. They, like other scientists, tend to be sober, data-driven people, cautious about making statements they can’t back up. So when I speak with one, I end the conversation with a personal question: “What does all this mean for your children or your grandchildren?”
Usually, they make eye contact, then look away and swallow hard. You can see their guard coming down, you can see the struggle between scientist and parent. Their responses are usually the same: “Their lives will be very different from ours.”
The Lies We Tell Ourselves
The seventh and deciding game of the National League Championship Series is tonight. It’s hard for me not to be a baseball fan at this time of year, but my enthusiasm throughout the summer is not as sharp as it once was and the reason is steroids.
Baseball players (and other athletes) have been using performance-enhancing drugs for over 30 years. Jim Bouton wrote all this down in 1969, but we pretended to ignore it; the ballpark was a place to get away from our troubles, not add to them.
The players, the owners, the fans all pretended the problem didn’t exist, so it got worse. We all wanted more home runs, more no-hitters, more stolen bases, more broken records and we didn’t care too much about asking how they happened. For the players and owners, all this meant more money and fame. Who would want to face the facts when turning one’s head away was so easy and so profitable?
So, here I am, a middle-aged baseball fan whose sport has turned to ashes in my mouth, because I – and everyone else – spent too many years not wanting to know the truth, or act on it. So what? Big deal, there are worse things in life. That’s exactly the point.
I was watching the Detroit Tigers complete their sweep of the Oakland A’s last week, brooding on years of steroid denial and realized that the same pattern of comforting denial we apply to sports, we also apply to global warming.
I had been speaking with colleagues earlier that day, about James Hansen, director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies. Dr. Hansen says we have ten years left to take drastic action before it will be too late to stop the runaway effects of global warming.
My colleagues were excited about the prospect if a new Congress in January and a new administration in 2009, as if a slightly altered political landscape will result in a 180-degree shift in policy. I pushed back, arguing that even if the right mechanisms are put in place, the sense of urgency we feel is not shared by the general public. It’s certainly not shared by those oil and auto executives who have been working for 25 years to get to the place where they can pull down the big payoff. Did my friends really think those men would forego their loot for the good of the planet?
“As the science shows the accelerating effects of global warming, it will drive change,” one responded. Really? What kind of science? Like studying the effects of a storm that wipes out a major American city, leaving bodies floating in the street? America had that wake-up call. We hit the “snooze” button.
The fact is, taking appropriate steps to stop global warming – if such steps are even still available to us – will cause massive economic disruption. Of course, not taking these steps will cause even worse economic disruption (not to mention ecological disruption), but my sense of our political and business leaders is that none of them have the courage to take an unpopular position, even if it means the salvation of society.
What do you do if you’re a climate scientist and your best professional opinion is that it’s too late already to stop global warming? Do you go public with that? Probably not. People would either disbelieve and call you nuts or believe and do nothing to stop pumping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. So you lie. Your public statement is that we’re very close to running out of time and that we have to act now.
It’s a reasonable strategy, because climate science is imprecise at best and there’s much we don’t know. Even our best science is to some extent a lie, because we know it’s not completely accurate, so I think climate scientists decide to tell the lie that they hope will do the most good.
But here’s the thing about climate scientists. They, like other scientists, tend to be sober, data-driven people, cautious about making statements they can’t back up. So when I speak with one, I end the conversation with a personal question: “What does all this mean for your children or your grandchildren?”
Usually, they make eye contact, then look away and swallow hard. You can see their guard coming down, you can see the struggle between scientist and parent. Their responses are usually the same: “Their lives will be very different from ours.”
© Mark Floegel, 2006