Showing posts with label climate skeptics. Show all posts
Showing posts with label climate skeptics. Show all posts

Wednesday, June 26, 2013

Climate Deniers Versus Reality, Once Again

In a major speech yesterday, President Barack Obama laid out a plan for dealing with climate change. It's not a perfect plan--it gives too much away to "clean coal," which doesn't exist, and to fracking, which causes more problems than it solves--but it's a start. It's good to see the president finally delivering on the promises he made throughout his first and second election campaigns.

When I posted on Facebook praising the president's speech, I received the anticipated response from a climate denier. With roughly 250 friends, I was bound to have a denier or two among them.

We're rapidly reaching the point where the voices of climate deniers, for all their sound and fury, are being drowned out by common sense. Within a decade, I anticipate, climate deniers will be seen pretty much the way people who claim to have been abducted by aliens are seen: as odd, sad, strange people who, for whatever reasons, refuse to live in the reality the rest of us live in.

Because you know, it is strange.  A recent study demonstrates that over 97% of climatologists--those are the experts who study climate--agree with the consensus on anthropogenic global warming. That's a significant percentage of experts. The proportion of experts who disagree, the study concludes, is "vanishingly small."

When I pointed this out to my climate denier friend, he objected that science isn't based on opinion polls. And I agree. But expert consensus is not the same as an opinion poll.

Experts are those who know a subject best. Opinion polls involve random samples of people who probably know very little about the subject under debate.

We base many of our decisions on expert consensus. When more than 97 percent of cardiologists tell us we have a heart problem, most of us decide to get heart surgery. When more than 97 percent of plumbers tell us we have a plumbing problem, most of us decide to get the pipes fixed. When more than 97 percent of ex-girlfriends tell us we have a bad breath problem, most of us decide to invest in some Tic Tacs.

Opinion, as I tell my students, isn't the same as informed opinion. And informed opinion isn't the same as expert opinion.

We're all entitled to our opinions. But only if we're informed--or better yet, experts--are we entitled to have our opinions count.

Sunday, March 10, 2013

Krancer Causes Cancer

In today's Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, I read that there are "45 current or former [Pennsylvania] state officials who have links to the energy industry and gas drilling and fracking regulation, including 28 who have left to take industry jobs."

These officials include our current and past three governors, as well as a bunch of other yahoos.  But my favorite has got to be Michael Krancer.

He's Pennsylvania's current secretary of the Department of Environmental Protection.  You know, the department that, like, is supposed to protect the environment.

But Krancer's ties to oil and gas interests run deep.  He was general counsel for a natural gas utility, Exelon, as well as a litigator for an industry lobbying group.  Not surprisingly, his principal activities as secretary have been to craft industry-friendly provisions, to fight citizen attempts to slow or halt the pace of shale gas development, and to make regulation of the industry as minimal and cumbersome as possible.

And then there's his position on global warming, as quoted here: "There is no uniformity within the scientific community on how much the warming is occurring.  And there’s no agreement about how much is attributable to the human part of it and how much is attributable to other factors.”

This is, of course, nonsense.  There's almost complete uniformity within the scientific community on both of these issues.  To those who want to deny the reality of anthropogenic global warming, such uniformity means there's some vast scientific conspiracy to quash dissent and amass lucrative research grants.  This, of course, makes no sense either, inasmuch as the real money lies in working for the oil and gas interests that deny global warming.  But global warming skeptics are a very stupid bunch of people, and they'll say just about anything to try to wiggle out of the facts.

I wrote a letter recently to Krancer, asking him to stop being such a stupid idiot and admit that the science says exactly what it says: that human beings are the main drivers of global warming, and that if we don't take immediate steps to curb it, we may well be living in an unlivable world by the end of the century.  Considering the severity of the issue, I was actually pretty polite; I did not, for example, use the words "stupid idiot."  I got a polite reply from his PR stupid idiot thanking me for my letter.

But since it seems to be Krancer's prerogative to say stupid, untrue things, I thought I'd exercise my own right to do the same.  So for the record: Michael Krancer causes cancer.

Though I'll admit there's not complete scientific consensus on that.

Sunday, May 15, 2011

Going Local

Yesterday was an environmentally friendly day for me. In the morning, my kids and I helped the Nine Mile Run Watershed Association plant trees; in the afternoon, I switched electricity generators to Viridian Energy, which will supply 100% of my electricity through wind power; and in the evening, I attended a lecture on sustainable agriculture by Anna Lappe, whose new book connects our eating choices to the climate crisis. And, having read recently that the majority of car trips we make are fewer than two miles, I decided to walk the mile and a half to the lecture and back. So there was lots of good stuff, environment-wise.

There was also one depressing moment, when I read the following passage in Michael Shuman's book Going Local:

"Governments will be increasingly inclined to put a tax on oil, as well as on other fossil fuels, to account for the environmental effects of burning them. There is a virtual consensus among scientists today . . . that human progress is warming the planet. . . . By the time the multi-trillion-dollar costs of global warming are clear enough to affect the market price of fossil fuels, it will be too late to prevent it. But political pressures will surely mount on governments to place taxes on these fuels, per unit of pollution (a carbon tax) or per unit of energy (a BTU tax), that will raise their prices and reduce releases of carbon into the atmosphere."

Shuman, writing in 1998, is certain that governments will come to their senses, tax carbon, and thereby level the playing field for the development of renewables. But here we are in 2011, and guess what? We haven't taxed carbon (partly because the scientific consensus Shuman applauds has been attacked relentlessly by climate change deniers); we're investing heavily (in both dollars and infrastructure) in the latest fossil fuel to come down the pike, natural gas; the market in renewables is stagnant; the price of oil is way up, but mostly because of unrest in the Middle East, not because of the environmental costs of burning it; global emissions continue to grow day by day; and the planet's climate is becoming increasingly unpredictable, chaotic, and punishing. At the national and international level, we've utterly failed as a species to take the necessary steps to protect our planet and ourselves.

Which is why, for the foreseeable future, I'm "going local," as the title of Shuman's book recommends. I'll plant trees in my own neighborhood, power my own house with wind energy, walk instead of drive, support local groups like the Nine Mile Run association, and otherwise focus on what I can do in my own community. I'll act locally, and think--or at least dream--of a time the global community will come around.

Wednesday, April 20, 2011

The Greediest Generation

Journalist Tom Brokaw famously dubbed the generation that came of age during the Depression and World War II "The Greatest Generation." This was a group of people with the wisdom to face these two global evils, the courage to confront them, and the selflessness to accept the sacrifices meeting them entailed.

By those standards, I guess you'd have to call the present generation of so-called grown-ups in this country "The Greediest Generation."

I was reminded of this when I read that all but one of the Republicans on the House Energy and Commerce Committee voted to deny the reality of global warming, regardless of cause. Yep, they actually voted--nary a climatologist in the bunch--to deny that global warming exists.

The hubris of such a vote is nearly unfathomable. It's as if they'd voted to deny that the earth revolves around the sun.

Beyond this, such a vote is strikingly stupid.

To put it in perspective, let's imagine these clowns had been in the House during our grandparents' time. They decide to take a vote on the reality of the Depression. Sure, lots of folks are out of work, the banks are bankrupt, the breadlines are growing, the breadbasket is blowing away in a cloud of dust, but is the Depression really real?

Nope, we don't think so.

And what about those politically-motivated rumors of war over in distant Europe? They say some guy named Hitler invaded Poland; that he's currently bombing England and France; that his tanks are in North Africa; that he's moving on Stalingrad? Let's take a vote on it.

No, there's no war.

We can deny all we want. We can even legitimize our denial through the political process.

But we can't change the nature of reality. It'll always be there, silent and irresistible, to show us when we're wrong.

Sunday, February 20, 2011

Burn, Baby, Burn


Sorry for the blaze of environmentally-themed posts in recent days--I promise I'll have something entirely new soon--but I was so incensed by the House vote yesterday, I just had to fire off this cartoon. And yes, as you can see, all the incendiary language is intentional.

Saturday, February 19, 2011

A Tolerable Planet

Recently, I reported on attempts to strip the Environmental Protection Agency of its power to regulate greenhouse gases. Today, I am sad to report House Republicans have had their way: in their spending bill, the House not only slashed EPA funding but tucked in an amendment to prohibit EPA regulation of heat-trapping gases. The reason, of course, is that they claim such regulations would hurt the economy.

The last time I talked about this issue, I tried to see it from the side of your average American, someone who's afraid of losing her or his job (or who has already lost it) and who honestly believes regulating CO2 and methane will hurt their chances of a decent life. That person, I suggested, was someone with whom one can sympathize.

But the Republican leadership and representatives aren't supposed to be your average Americans. Politicians are supposed to be forward-thinking, insightful people who understand the implications of their actions. They're supposed to think about the damn future, not just about the next election cycle.

Sadly, American politics are in ideological freefall, with neither party able to govern effectively. All they can do is piss off the electorate enough that the vote swings toward the other party two or four years later.

We are living in a climate-altered world. That's fact, not ideology. If the world's climate gets much worse, we may not be living at all. I can appreciate the difficulty of the average citizen in accepting that reality. But I can't accept elected officials' ideological purblindness to the actual world in which they and their constituents live.

Thoreau wrote in his journal: "What is the use of a house if you haven't got a tolerable planet to put it on?" That was in the 1850s. He was thinking of the future. If he were here today, he'd surely be shocked and saddened to see so many of the nation's supposed leaders living in the past.

Thursday, December 30, 2010

The Politics of Climate Denial

Following on the heels of my "Warming in a Winter Wonderland" post of a couple weeks back, my fellow blogger at "Fracked Again" has posted a great video from the Rachel Maddow show connecting winter snowstorms to climate denial to the new Republican House leadership to the oil-funded organization Americans for Prosperity to . . . well, you get the picture. Thanks to the aforementioned blogger for this video, and watch it if you don't mind weeping profusely over the future of our planet and our species.

Tuesday, December 14, 2010

Warming in a Winter Wonderland


It never fails. The first spell of bad winter comes along (we’ve currently got four inches of snow and temps in the teens here in Pittsburgh), and questions start to arise about the validity of global warming. Last year, when two feet got dumped on us in a single night, the naysayers, conservative talk-show hosts, and industry lobbyists had a field day. How, they asked--and expected only one answer--can the planet be warming when it’s so gosh-darned cold outside?


Never mind that there’s nothing in the science of global warming that says anything about cold days vanishing from the globe. Never mind that increased precipitation is one of the expected results of warmer air, which holds more moisture than its colder cousin. The real problem is that most people get all confused--and the skeptics thrive on seeding such confusion--about the difference between weather and climate. The former, since we live with it on a moment-by-moment, day-by-day basis, might seem like the thing to focus our attention on. But it’s not.


Weather--the atmospheric conditions in any given place at any given time--is, as we all know, wildly variable. The proverbial butterfly’s wings can change it, and meteorologists struggle to predict it as little as twenty-four hours in advance. It would be foolhardy to attempt a weather forecast of more than a few days--to predict, say, the weather in Pittsburgh a year from now. Chances are you’d be off by as much as 30 or 40 degrees in either direction--to say nothing of clouds, precipitation, wind, and all the rest.


Climate is different. As the composite of weather averaged over space and time, climate is remarkably stable, and can be forecast with considerable confidence years, even centuries, in advance. In the case of global climate, human beings have enjoyed roughly the same one for thousands of years. The last time the planet’s climate looked significantly different, Cro-Magnons were hunting mastodons and a mile of ice flattened Manhattan. The time before that, when the planet was appreciably warmer, tyrannosaurs roamed North America and crocodiles cruised the poles. The stability and predictability of our present climate is what enabled human civilization to become what it is today.


And that’s the ultimate irony: for the past two centuries, human civilization has tampered with the very climate that, for the past two millennia, made human civilization possible. The planet is warming--and more rapidly than ever before. (Indeed, even with its unseasonably cold December, 2009 is tied for second hottest year on record, and at the end of the day the past winter, on average, was warmer than the one that preceded it.) We’ve made great, and undeniable, advances as a species: advances in technology, in medicine, in science, in human rights, in art. Since the dawn of the Hydrocarbon Era, we’ve made those advances with ever accelerating ease. But in so doing, we’ve degraded the planetary climate (not to mention the planetary soils, waters, and affiliated organisms) perhaps beyond recall.


We have a couple choices here. We can acknowledge the reality of climate change, and respond appropriately. Or we can deny that dire reality and continue to dig ourselves deeper into a hole.


If we choose the first option, our choosing can’t be like the weather, which changes every day. It has to be like the climate, which steadies us and survives deep into the future.

Tuesday, June 15, 2010

Denying the (Climate) Holocaust

I was doing some research for a class I’m preparing on Holocaust literature, and I came across a review of Holocaust films on Netflix that read in part, “It’s time for new facts and real research into [the Holocaust], not the old propaganda.” I was struck by this statement for a number of reasons, not least because it so resembled the complaints you hear from climate change deniers. To many, it seems, the accumulation of fact and research, the growth of scientific consensus on the subject, cast doubt on its validity; where most people agree that a preponderance of fact increases the likelihood of something being true, the deniers argue, paradoxically, that the more agreement there is among scientists, the more likely it is that the science is nothing but lies. I still remember the example that was used in high school to introduce us to scientific method: the statement “copper always burns with a green flame” was based on countless observations of copper burning with a green flame. This doesn’t prove beyond doubt that copper will always burn with a green flame. But it does render suspect the statement, “copper does not burn with a green flame” or, worse, “those who claim that copper burns with a green flame are trying to hoodwink an unsuspecting public with shameless, self-serving propaganda.”

Now, we all know the Holocaust occurred. The evidence is irrefutable. But there are still those who refute it, not only neo-Nazis but average people who insist that no matter how much evidence we amass--indeed, in direct relation to the increase of evidence--the whole thing must be a fabrication. And, without suggesting that climate change deniers are identical to Holocaust deniers, I’d like to explore the mentality that produces such an unwonted break from logic. In what follows, I’m going to avoid the most common explanation: that we deny climate change because acting to avert it would entail such monumental disruption in our way of life. That’s a big part of it, certainly, but I think there are other, perhaps even more fundamental psychological motivations at play.

The first of such motivations to come to mind is that people don’t readily accept bad news; this is why, as has been amply documented, denial is one of the predominant responses to terminal illness, whether one’s own or that of a friend or family member. The Holocaust, like global warming, is bad news; it sickens most people to confront what occurred there (as it sickens most to confront the scenarios for a post-climate-change planet), and some resort to denial, I suspect, as a means of softening the blow. Who wants to admit that the human race is so awful? Who wants to be a member of a species capable of such atrocities? It’s far more congenial to one’s self-image to believe that really bad things, even those that were produced by others and that happened to others (much less those that are produced by ourselves and will happen to ourselves), didn’t really happen. If the Holocaust did occur, it means, hypothetically, that it could occur again, or even more personally, that the people you think you know, the people you love, even the person you are, might be led to participate in it. Far better to deny, and in so doing to restore one’s faith in the essential goodness of friends, family, and self.

Then there’s the distrust of authorities or, at its most extreme, anti-intellectualism that’s been such a prominent part of America’s collective mentality for so long (and that’s been exploited so successfully by certain political parties to score points and win elections). Looked at not from a cultural but from an individual perspective, this aspect of the denier’s mentality makes perfect sense. Who wants to feel stupid? Who wants to be put in the position of a three-year-old having grown-ups explain the nature of reality to you? But that’s precisely where climate science puts the vast majority of us (I include myself): it’s so damn complicated, no matter how many analogies they try to use (greenhouses, blankets, etc.), we find ourselves being preached to by smarty-pants eggheads who think they know so much more than the rest of us. That’s a real blow to the ego, and it’s preferable for many to conclude that the eggheads don’t really know more than we do, in fact that they know less, and that in reality they’re only trying to confuse us to gain publicity, grant money, fame, and power.

Finally--and this is the most subtle and, in some ways, least explicable factor--there simply seems to be an information threshold or saturation point in the human mind, beyond which fact turns to falsehood, truth to lie. We can observe this in everyday life when we begin to doubt the professions of love from our partner, or the sincerity of our boss or congressperson, or the validity of our most deeply held religious beliefs. “The lady doth protest too much, methinks,” Hamlet’s mother remarks of the drama her son has staged to expose his uncle’s (her current husband’s) treachery; leaving aside her obvious desire to reject this all-too-true representation of events, her distrust of the performer’s words, her assumption that when “too much” is said in one direction the opposite must actually be true (and what is said mere performance), is familiar to all of us. Tell a person about climate change once, or a hundred times, and she might believe you. Tell the same person a thousand times, and she might begin to doubt.

Understanding the mentality of climate denial as I’ve tried to do here does not, perhaps, get us any closer to a solution. Polls show that in increasing numbers, Americans are denying the reality of climate change; their native capacity for doubt, enhanced by institutional provocateurs with considerable cash, clout, and interest, has undone much of what science managed to do in the past decade. And so we have no climate legislation, no international climate agreement, precious little money for alternative energies, and the chorus of “drill, baby, drill” continuing to mount despite the disaster in the Gulf. Far from overcoming denial, we have succeeded largely in augmenting it.

And should global holocaust actually ensue, I’m sure we will have people on the other side of that catastrophe insisting that it never happened.

Monday, April 19, 2010

Bliss Is Ignorance

A new environmental essay of mine , titled "Bliss Is Ignorance," just appeared in the zine The Earth Comes First. I'm starting to have some success getting my writing placed in environmentally themed journals (including Canary, Terrain.org, and The Fear of Monkeys). I've also floated an environmental memoir about my frog-catching days that I hope will be picked up sooner or later. These publications are especially gratifying to me because, as a lifetime environmentalist--one who's tried his hand at everything from hosting rallies to joining environmental groups to lobbying politicians--I've long felt that I can best effect change through the written word. Check 'em out and let me know what you think!

Tuesday, April 13, 2010

Facing the Inevitable

A friend forwarded me a report by a team of U.S., French, and Swiss scientists, first published last January, that concludes that global warming has reached a "point of no return," with its effects likely to linger for 1000 years even if we trim emissions back to pre-industrial levels.

Then there's my son, seven years old in less than a month, who for some reason (maybe because he's thinking about birthday presents) insisted on reading When Santa Turned Green as his bedtime book tonight. The story involves Santa's discovery of melting North Pole ice, his appeal to the world's children to address the problem of global warming, and the successful outcome of their efforts. The book's moral is deeply hopeful: "[Children] have the power to change the world." And in this book, they do.

Not being a child anymore, I'm doubtful if recycling plastic soda bottles will arrest global warming. I'm concerned lest we send the wrong message to those who bear our future, those whose own futures we've infringed upon through our habits of consumption and waste. I don't want my or anyone's children to despair--which some might be inclined to do if the effects of climate change are indeed irreversible--but neither do I want them to trivialize the problem, to imagine that there's a quick fix to the mess their parents and their parents' parents have gotten them into.

We've got to have hope--otherwise, why go on? But having hope doesn't need to mean denying, ignoring, or downplaying the realities. Having hope can mean accepting those realities and forging ahead nonetheless. (We all know we're going to die; in that sense, life is hopeless. But that needn't, and for most of us doesn't, stop us from trying to live, and to live good lives at that.) Individually, maybe even collectively, we might not be able to avert the inevitable climate effects our civilization has produced. We might have to live with those effects for a long, long time. But even if so, the choice presented to us is still a choice between living thoughtfully or living carelessly. The choice is between knowledge and ignorance. The choice is between moral and amoral, or even immoral, behavior.

Inevitability doesn't absolve us of responsibility.

Monday, March 15, 2010

Just a Theory

Building on new initiatives that would require the teaching of evolutionary and climate science to be counterbalanced by competing theories (intelligent design, climate skepticism), Republicans have now set their sights on an even more pernicious (though widely accepted) scientific theory: the theory of gravity.

"The prevailing orthodoxy among liberal elites is that some mysterious, invisible, unmeasurable force actually sticks our bodies to the planet," said conservative talk-show host Lush Rimshot. "We maintain that our children must be taught both sides of the debate."

When asked to specify the alternative to the theory of gravity, Rimshot mumbled something about tiny invisible angels sent by the Apostle Paul to gently lower true believers to earth.

Similar attacks on the so-called "GraviNazis" were afoot in Texas, where a bill was introduced in the state legislature that would require children to hang upside down from monkey bars for six straight hours until loss of consciousness enabled them to experience a condition resembling weightlessness, and in South Carolina, where the lieutenant governor, D'Andre Dour, likened belief in gravity to the practice of withcraft. "My ol' granny done tole me ya don't feed mincemeat to snappin' dawgs," Dour told the Columbia Star-Centinel. "If'n ya do, them bad boys'll jist keep on breedin'." When asked to elaborate on the relationship this piece of folk wisdom bore to the science of gravity, Dour dropped to the floor, making the sign of the cross and foaming at the mouth.

Opponents of gravity-only science education note that the scientific community is deeply divided over the validity of Newtonian physics, the heliocentric theory, and indeed everything that isn't written down plain in the Good Book. Senator James Inahuff of Oklahoma went even farther, likening gravity-deniers to the Founding Fathers, whose radical and unprecedented defense of individual liberty for free white property-holding aristocratic male Virginian slaveholders was viewed as radical and unprecedented at the time.

"We will win in the end," Inahuff predicted. "Truth always wins over falsehood. The theory of gravity will go down to bitter defeat when enough people come to accept Jesus Christ as their personal Lord and Savior." Were the theory of gravity legitimate, Inahuff noted parenthetically, the Good Lord would never have been able to walk on water.

Lots of equally stupid people were unavailable for comment.

Thursday, December 17, 2009

We Were Warmed

My parents, God love 'em, never throw anything away. Usually this is a source of consternation and physical inconvenience--as when one tries to maneuver around the tottering piles of years-old newspapers that litter their home--but occasionally it can be a source of revelation, a recovery from a buried personal archaeology. That's what happened yesterday.

I was searching for their old copy of The Night before Christmas, the book my dad used to read to us every Christmas Eve. I figured the original, if it was there at all, would be in too shabby a shape to risk reading, but I thought I might find the same edition on Amazon or Ebay to read to my own children. What I found instead, among the moldering, masking-taped series of Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew mysteries that crowd their attic bookcase, was a book from 1974, when I was nine, a book titled Dar Tellum: Stranger from a Distant Planet. It's the kind of book my almost-eleven-year-old daughter still likes to read between mammoth chunks of her favorite fantasies, Harry Potter and Percy Jackson: a chapter book, yes, but with large print, pictures on every third or fourth page, and only sixty-four pages total. So I snatched it--one less piece of junk for my parents to deal with, one less for me to deal with once they're gone--and took it home.

That's when I discovered a certain eerie appropriateness in my choice. I'd remembered the book's basic plot as soon as I saw it: a lonely boy begins to receive telepathic communications from an intergalactic being, Dar Tellum, with whom he forms a friendship. What I hadn't remembered, though, was the plot's principal conflict. Here's how the protagonist/narrator tells it:

"It seems that the planet Earth was right in the middle of a big crisis. Dozens of cities were in danger of becoming flooded. . . . And the reason for this flooding was that the oceans were getting higher.

"From what I understood, and I'm sure there are gaps here and there, the smoke from cars and factories goes into the air. A part of this smoke called carbon dioxide gets into the atmosphere of Earth. It lets the sun's heat in, but it won't let much heat out. This carbon dioxide makes a kind of one-way lid on Earth. Heat in, but not much out.

"And this extra heat was warming up the north and south poles. So the ice was melting and the oceans were getting higher."

How could I have forgotten my introduction (in 1974, mind you) to global warming? Was the idea so scary I wanted to forget? Or--and this is another way of asking the same question--did the concept seem so preposterous, even more unbelievable than telepathic communication with interstellar strangers, that I'd easily dismissed it? To put it succinctly: was I, at age nine, a climate skeptic?

I suppose I was. And I suppose, at age nine, I was entitled to be. But now here we are, with a third of a century behind us, a third of a century filled with warnings from aliens and earthlings alike, and collectively, we as a society are still nine years old. Still wishing it gone, stashing it in our parents' bookshelves, forgetting it, treating it as fantasy rather than fact. Still, to cite the final words of a grown-up book, Elizabeth Kolbert's Field Notes from a Catastrophe, waiting for someone else (Dar Tellum?) to magically make it go away:

"All of the studies and news stories were there for everyone to read. But the storm of the future lay in the future, while the costs of preparing for it would have had to be borne in the present. It was easier, both psychically and economically, to turn away from the facts. And so life went on as before, and everyone hoped for the best."

Kolbert is talking specifically about Hurricane Katrina, finding in our non-response to the warnings that loomed over that doomed city an apt analogy to our non-response to the larger issue of global warming. Had she read Dar Tellum, she might have seen the warnings there too: smoke from factories and cars, warming poles, rising oceans, drowned cities. The stories were there for everyone to read.

But we'd rather hear a different story.

The tagline to the blockbuster movie 2012 reads: "We Were Warned." That what we were warned about is at once quasi-mystical (the end of the Mayan calendar), completely unrelated to the excesses of industrial civilization, and, as it happens, a result of the modern-day climate skeptics' favorite hobby-horse (solar flares) suggests that this movie's outrageous popularity owes at least something to its ability to preserve us blameless, childlike, without sin. In denial. Still preferring to tell ourselves a different story. Still forgetting that one book in our parents' attics that, years ago, might have told us the truth.