The Gorilla in the Room: The Blind Men and the Elephant

Remember the fable of the blind men and the elephant?  Each one felt a different part of the elephant and each one came to different conclusions about what an elephant was.  If they could have only stepped back, and actually looked at the elephant as a whole, any bickering would have instantly stopped.  This is an old fable, but lots of years and gobs of technological improvement later have we become any wiser?

 “This is the worse drought ever in Texas---the world is drying up!”

 “That’s not right.  The Mississippi is flooding everything here.  The world is heading for major flooding!” 

“You’re both wrong!  Tornados are destroying everything around me in Tennessee. We’re headed for a world of severe storms and monster hurricanes!”

“You’re all wrong! This is the coldest spring ever in Washington.  Snow is still piled up everywhere in the mountains.  It’s not global warming, it’s global cooling!”

 These voices are everywhere.  But!  We need to step back, open our eyes and see the whole “elephant”, not the parts by themselves.

 From my previous “Gorilla in the Room” blogs we know that changing the amount of sunlight reaching the earth, or the amount of gases (the dreaded green house ones) helping to trap radiation returning to outer space will change the temperature of the Earth.  The amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere has increased and will increase faster and faster as more people want more things.  From what we now know this should lead to the Earth warming up, but is it?

 If we want to measure the temperature of the Earth, we have to measure the whole Earth. We can calculate the average temperature of the Earth from a number of recording stations that have long term records.  Unfortunately, anything that humans get involved in often falls into bickering for mostly selfish reasons.  But there are other voices we can listen to----voices that have no religion, no political axe to grind, no point of view to push, no money to gain or lose, no monstrous ego to push them.  We should listen to these unbiased and truthful voices.  See if you can guess who these voices are:

 “I hunt seals and need that food to raise my young.  The sea ice is melting all around me.  I swim all day hoping to find ice to hunt on, but tire and drown. I can mate with the brown ones, but then I’ll disappear from the earth”

“I’m moving higher up the mountain I live on and the view just keeps getting better and better.”

“Lately, I’ve been moving northward.  I always wanted to see the arctic.”

“I was the strongman of the north.  I could hold up whole buildings year around.  Now I’m turning to mush”

“Once, my snow and ice reached down into the valleys.  Now I’m only a shadow of my former self”

“I can swim further north now.  The coast of Washington State is very pretty in the summer.”

“I love the changing Earth.  I live by making animals sicken and die.  As I move northward that’s all the more victims for me and my kind.”

“I’ve been trapped in Antarctica for too many years to remember.  Now I’ve finally broken lose and get to travel the oceans.”

“I used to cover much of the Earth.  Now I’m reclaiming the shorelines of all the continents as melting ice and warmer temperatures swell me.  I’ll show everyone who the boss of this Earth is.”

“All those pesky shellfish are too scratchy for me.  If I continue to become more acidic I might be able to get rid of them.”

These voices have no agenda and don’t lie.  Whether we like it or not or even believe it, the Earth is warming, and we (all of us) are causing it.  In my next blog I’ll write about what the warming Earth means for us.