Senate Admits Climate Change Is Real, Whining that It's Not Our Fault

Last week the Senate acknowledged in a 98-1 vote that climate change is real, but like some rich kid who wrecked the family car, Republicans whined that it's not our fault.

Senator James Inhofe of Oklahoma, the Republican who has for years insisted that climate change is a hoax, voted in support of the measure, saying:

Climate is changing and climate has always changed and always will. There is archaeological evidence of that, there is biblical evidence of that, there is historical evidence of that, [but t]here are some people who are so arrogant to think they are so powerful they can change climate.

What's arrogant is that Inhofe thinks that 7 billion people pumping 35 billion tons of CO2 into the atmosphere each year for centuries will have no effect on the climate. We are burning thousands of billions of tons coal, oil and gas that it took nature billions of years to bury in the span of a few hundred years.

A few million people can change the climate of entire states just by burning gasoline, or by replacing vegetation with concrete and asphalt. A few thousand people can change the climate of Brazil by cutting down hundreds of millions of acres of rainforest over a period of a decade or two. Hundreds of coal plants in China belching out smoke and ash can not only foul the air and kill thousands of Chinese annually, but that much crap in the air alters air temperature by several degrees.

It took just a few tens of thousands of people to create a dust bowl in Inhofe's own Oklahoma in the 1930s. Over the decades farmers cut down millions of acres of oak savannahs and tore up the natural prairie grasses and replaced them with crops. Poor agricultural practices combined with drought caused terrible dust storms that forced tens of thousands of Texans, Oklahomans and Kansans to abandon their farms, exacerbating the effects of the Depression. It took decades to recover, economically and ecologically.

Removing vegetation -- forests and prairies -- and replacing it with crops, roads or buildings on a large scale changes the climate. Forests are one of the major the driving forces of climate. Trees put oxygen into the atmosphere and take carbon dioxide out. Remove them and you change the climate. Drastically.

Inhofe doesn't seem to understand how big a number 7 billion is, or the massive scale of what we do to the environment. He seems to think that humans are tiny and insignificant compared to the wide world.

The fact is, earth's atmosphere originally contained no oxygen. Earth has an oxygen atmosphere today only because tiny and insignificant cyanobacteria began to emit oxygen billions of years ago.

We are millions of times bigger than those tiny, insignificant bacteria and there are 7 billion of us. We humans now produce more CO2 than all the oceans, trees, plants and algae in the world can absorb. That's why CO2 is slowly building up in the atmosphere.

Since we're making more CO2 than plants are making oxygen, the undeniable conclusion is that we are altering the climate.

Of course, we'll run out of oil and coal long before we turn the planet into an inhospitable desert planet like Venus. But the economic and social costs of dealing with the mess we're creating will far exceed the costs of curbing our gluttonous appetite for carbon. And because the oil and coal will eventually run out, we'll have to make this change in any case.

Why not do it now, while we are still rich enough and aren't going to war with every other country for the last few barrels of oil beneath the arctic?