Is Everyone Nuts?

I remember once when I was in the seventh grade I got in an argument on the school bus home with another kid who claimed we had already landed men on the moon. This was 1954. We wouldn't land men on the moon for another 15 years. The Soviet Union had not even launched Sputnik yet. Yet he was convinced the Eagle had landed (and was pretty surly about it too).

So how did he get everything so wrong?

I think it was the temper of the times. Dozens of science fiction movies showed us landing on the moon, on Mars, going to the center of the earth, and doing all kinds of things. UFOs were regularly in the news. The subject was in the air, just like global warming is in the air today. And just like 50 years ago people believe things about global warming that are not remotely true.

Today I saw on article by one Simon Garfield in The Guardian about the supposed plight of polar bears. He quoted the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) According to him, the IPCC's verdict was stark and quantifiable. "In some areas the devastation is irreversible: we are already too late, for example, to avert the effects of the recent rises in sea levels."

I had to read that paragraph about three times. What recent rise in sea level was he talking about? The only rise in sea level I was aware of was a 1/10 of 1 inch rise per yearin recent years, which is to say a rise so small as to be virtually indistinguishable in the noise. Yet Mr. Garfield confidently blames the demise of polar bears, which hasn't happened yet, on a rise in sea level which hasn't occurred.

What I don't understand is how any editor could let something like this slip through. My only explanation is that the subject is so much in the air that it is accepted even when it hasn't happened. At the time we invaded Iraq something like 60% of the American public thought that Saddam Hussein was behind the attack on the World Trade Center. It was absurd. It's the same thing about global warming. Al Gore's documentary, "An Inconvenient Truth," talks about so much about an imminent 20 foot rise in sea level that many people, I'm sure, think it has already occurred, including Mr. Garfield.