In his editorial today, Rob Robb took timid steps to explore the politics of global warming. He asked us to "assume that a warming planet has contributed to drought." He suggested that even if it were a problem, attempts to understand or control the effects were for future centuries. I am sure his view will be echoed by many Americans, skeptical as many of them are of wearing masks to prevent the spread of COVID-19 or vaccinating children against measles or other killer diseases. Americans prefer living in the now and treasure their independence. Many are "doubting Thomases" and until they have put their fingers in the wound will continue to be skeptics. For them the economy will come back, their investments are safe so far, and those who spread doom and gloom are to be resisted with American optimism.

Why are Americans like this? Is it their fierce independence or lemming-like inability to understand the issues. Optimism carried this country through its many trials and tribulations and is at the very heart of the American spirit. But might it also be the Achilles heel?

One answer why there is so much resistance to established scientific ideas might be because there is very little general science education. Education for the majority of Americans is about getting the skills and knowledge to get a good job. Understanding science has no material rewards unless it gets you into the college of your choice. Why would anyone want to know about pandemics? There's no money in it. There's no money in vaccines unless suddenly there's a problem and government has to invest millions. So the whole of society when faced with this pandemic is caught in this vacuum of ignorance. Nobody knows what to do. Nobody knows how to cope with it. The Chinese did, a little belatedly, the Taiwanese did, the Singaporeans did, the Germans did, the Japanese did.... but we don't, so our death rates keep growing. We have not found a workable answer. And we are probably going to go on dying in significant numbers because we don't understand what a pandemic is.

To understand global warming is even more problematic. From my experience of High School in America, The only geography taught is learning place names. Teaching physical geography, is not part of the education system. We don't teach our children in High School about glaciation, about the Gulf Stream drift, about the physics of atmosphere, hydrosphere, biosphere, or the geosphere. There's no money in it. Why would anyone want to know? The ice caps and glaciers are melting rapidly and predictably because we are burning fossil fuels. We're putting back the CO2 that was trapped millions of years ago during the ice ages. The Arctic and Antarctic used to be tropical... this is science. The process unfortunately, is not reversible except over a very long period, longer than our or our children's or our children's children's lifetimes.

So, to quote Apollo 13 astronauts, "Houston we have a problem!" We are gradually changing the planet that has supported us and given us life. The planet has been through so many changes in its lifetime, it does not care. So human beings die out. Big deal. Millions of species have died out and we have the fossils. We have only just arrived. Perhaps in some distant future, survivors or life from another planet will do an archeological search and find our remains. Perhaps the rich will be buried with gold bars and clasp AR-15s in their hands, who knows? In the meantime, we could all look at and try to understand the science of how the planet is warming and find ways, each of us, to reduce the CO2 and preserve this beautiful world that lovingly supports us.