Focus on Air Pollution, not Climate Change

I'd like to digress from the debate about anthropological vs natural global warming, and challenge our thinking about why we should care.  Does it really matter whether the planet is warming naturally or because we played a part in stoking the global furnace?  Consensus is building that the planet is getting warmer. But just because the planet is getting warmer, are we compelled to do something about it, regardless of whether it's a natural event or manufactured by human activity? 

I remember when air pollution was the rallying cry of environmentalists.  And so much has been done to clean up our air. But when did the world turn away from our seemingly united focus of fighting air pollution and redirect all of our energy towards  fighting climate change?  I don't understand what happened. The arguments for and against climate change, and what, if anything, should be done about it seems to obscure a more fundamental problem- good old fashioned air pollution. I realize that there are health impacts of having a warmer planet, but hey, we lived without air conditioning for all but the last fifty years. We can adapt to temperature change, but we can't adapt to poison in our air.

We've been living with the Clean Air Act for over forty years.  Our air is cleaner today than it was back in 1970, despite our continued and much greater use of fossil fuels. The cars and power plants are all running cleaner today than ever before. Is that battle won? Is it good enough?  Is that why we have swung our  focus over to climate change?  

I don't know.  But dirty air is something everyone could rally behind and did support for the most part. Climate change isn't. The pros and cons of climate change are vigorously defended, and we seem to be in a political stalemate. Perhaps the naysayers are on to something here. Perhaps climate change isn't the life or death issue that air pollution is.

My personal view of climate change is we have to live with it, whether we created it or not, and little can be done to avert it except to reduce future greenhouse gas emissions.  The carbon stored in the ground originally came from vegetation. Granted, it took a long time to collect and store the carbon - possibly millions of years - and we're hell-bent to pull it all out of the earth in hundreds of years. That could be a troublesome discontinuity for the planet. But the earth  has endured continuous and dramatic climate change in the past, without us.  

Our moral outrage today seems to stem from a view that we sinned against the planet, and therefore we should undo it, as some kind of mea culpa to mother nature. From my perspective, that alone is not a good enough reason to spend inordinate amounts of time, resources and money to try and make amends. We have better and more life threatening issues to deal with- like poverty, literacy, healthcare, infrastructure, and human coexistence on a shrinking planet.

So I really don't care if the planet warms up. Actually, I don't even mind if gets warmer. I'd care a lot more if the planet cooled down. But I'm from New Hampshire.  I watch videos of melting glaciers and see nothing unnatural about it. What is the impact of melting polar caps? More water, less ice. What is the impact of polar bears and penguins? They move and yes, some may be lost to climate change, but didn't we also lose all of our dinosaurs? Polar bears have been migrating across the earth in search of food in the midst of climate change for a very long time, and they're still around. 

OK, if the sea level rises we have a problem. There will be low land flooding to fend off, but Venice, Holland and New Orleans have been dealing with that for hundreds of years. If we have to address rising seas, it isn't  today's problem, or next year, or not even in ten years. Fifty or a hundred years from now the rise in sea level could be significant, but we're the most adaptable animal on the planet. We can deal with that. There's time to deal with that.

People warn about the cost of climate change. Good point. It may very well have a huge cost impact. But in political terms, that means jobs. Who pays for the jobs will be a long unending debate, but if anything, climate change will be a major economic engine in the next hundred years. And I'm sure that any island or country that is too poor to deal with rising sea level will survive by migrating inland, just as humans have done for 30 thousand years or more. 

We forget that civilizations are building on top of older structures all the time. That's why archeologists have to dig so deep to uncover thousand year old relics and cities. A thousand years from now  archeologists will likely be doing under water exploration of many current seaside communities.

So,  why should we be concerned about global warming or climate change??? I'm not. I will fight for cleaner air, but not against  warmer air.  I can live with warmer air, as long as it's clean.