Sign of the times and global warming

Saw a banner along Highway 1 in Moss Landing: “Not smart enough for science? Try religion.” I got a laugh out of it, but then, as serendipity would have it, someone sent me an article: In the United States, more people believe that houses can be haunted by the dead than believe that the living can cause climate change.

The percentage of people who believe humans are contributing to global warming has dropped to 36%, while those who believe that ghosts haunt houses stands at 37%. Also, and I didn’t make this up, the haunted house numbers are higher and the warming numbers lower among conservatives and church goers. So, we come full turn to the banner on the highway.

Now, in all fairness, the banner doesn’t have it quite right. It isn’t that these people aren’t necessarily smart. Stupidity is a condition of birth. If you are born a 40 watt bulb in a 100 watt world, you can’t do very much about it. At issue here is ignorance.

Ignorance is a personal choice made by people who want simple explanations that make them feel secure, rather than take the effort to delve into matters, think them out and try for a deeper understanding. Most issues are complex, having many shades of gray, making even many smart people uncomfortable. It’s so much easier to frame everything as right or wrong, good or evil, black or white, left or right or people like us vs. people like them. I have a sneaking suspicion that religion got its start catering to that gnawing need in people.

However, with mounting scientific evidence for global climate change, evidence that can be understood with only the application of the high school chemistry class we took, people who disbelieve that the huge amount of carbon spewing from our cars and industries is going into the atmosphere and having an effect on weather, no longer simply have their heads in the sand. Rather, they have their heads in a much darker, less pleasant place.

On the other hand, haunted houses remain a romantic notion, made lovable in films like “The Ghost and Mrs. Muir.” While there is no scientific evidence for ghosts, and while it is highly unlikely that something remains after death that is capable of haunting, the possibility that there are ghosts and haunted houses can’t be totally disproved.

While ghosts are elusive and hard to prove, we can roughly measure the carbon that we, through modern industrial technology, are putting into the atmosphere. We also know how carbon combines and how it affects sunlight.

Religion doesn’t necessarily take sides against atmospheric science and for the paranormal. It does, however, predispose people to simplistic and erroneous answers.