The gibberish-spewing, liquor-smelling doomsayer on the street corner has a new name: Al Gore. Attention left-leaning Bluejays, you've been duped. At some point during their recent years of impotence, a crack team of Democratic strategists retreated to a backroom to kick around possible issues. They pondered. What's as scary as 9/11 but scarier? What's just inaccessible enough to average Americans that they won't question it? What will cause people to say `the scientific community' a lot? Let me throw in one fact before you crumple this paper up and place it in the nearest recycling bin: global warming exists. But it's not that big of a deal.
Hopkins' own lecturing superstar Professor Ginsberg recounts in his Introduction to American Politics class a scene of similar Washington opportunism. The notorious demagogue Joe McCarthy and some of his consultants are sitting in a diner, brainstorming campaign issues. One staffer pitches anticommunism. McCarthy smiles. The rest is history, spawned from a simple and recurring formula: take a potentially explosive issue and exaggerate the hell out of it.
Enter Al Gore. It's easy to fall under Al's charm. Most of us view him through rose-colored glasses. He is the sane, intelligent foil to Bush's buffoonery. Gore is like that fun uncle who owns a motorcycle and plays in a rock band on the weekend. In one scene in his film An Incovenient Truth, Gore is typing away on a fifteen-inch Macbook. Just like us! It still hurts to think that five hundred Floridians could have saved us from W.'s disastrous tenure (ironically, Florida is one of the states that Gore predicts will soon be underwater).
But let us not forget that Gore is a dyed-in-the-wool politician. He may genuinely care about the environment and the fate of our planet, but we cannot trust him when it comes to urgency. Politics and science do not mix. A sensitive scientific issue will be exploited, corrupted and stripped of many layers of truth in the hands of a politician. Bush once comically stated that the "jury is still out" on evolution. Former Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist diagnosed Terri Schiavo from what looked like a TiVo, and now Al Gore cries Armageddon.
A recent New York Times article explains that many reputable scientists are calling "Mr. Gore's central points c9 exaggerated and erroneous." Gore rebuts by saying he covered "the most important and salient points" and that "the degree of scientific consensus on global warming has never been stronger."
Yes, the consensus is overwhelming that global warming exists, and is most likely caused by humans. But that misses the key question: Should we care? There is consensus that the avian flu exists. But how imminent is the threat? How imminent is the nebulous doom that is climate change? The scientific community is not so united on that question. A truly terrifying revelation in the article is that many scientists "commend [Gore's] popularizations and call his science basically sound." Basically sound? Science, the last bastion of truth, is compromising itself to be popular.
So what are we undergrads left to think? A once mildly compelling issue of green earth and clean air has been co-opted by an alarmist presidential hopeful (I will wager any amount of money that Gore's name will be on the `08 ballot). Those of us who don't buy into it but wish to help the planet are wary of joining a ridiculous doomsday crusade. And what's the point if Baltimore will be under a glacier by graduation? There are more important things to focus one's energy and resources on: the war in Iraq, terrorism, stem cell research, poverty, racial equality, unemployment and education among other unexaggerated, authentic causes.
Here at Homewood, the Hopkins Energy Action Team (HEAT) hands out fliers and petitions the administration to make our campus more eco-friendly. Next time you encounter one of their posters or buttons, take a good look at their logo. It's nearly an exact reproduction of the iconic image of six marines raising the American Flag on Iwo Jima, the setting of some of World War II's most hellish combats. Except it's not a flag, it's a giant windmill --- another prime example of the cringe-inducing self-importance of the global warming movement.
Dustin Lushing is a freshman Writing Seminars major from Far Hills, N.J.
