Discouraged

Today, I met with a group of teachers that I'm taking on my summer road trip about Energy Issues along the Wasatch Front. (That was not the discouraging thing!) But while I was talking about my own biases, in the interests of full disclosure, I explained that as a scientist, I believe that data trump everything. And I believe this so strongly, it's such a deep part of my being, that I don't seem to be able to even imagine seeing the world any other way. So I had this in my head, and I was trying to imagine what it would be like to not believe in graphs.

And then, in the car, NPR had American Routes on, and sometimes I don't like to listen to that. So I flipped around the channels, and ran into KSL. Where some lunatic was talking about global warming and climate change, and how they don't exist. And he was saying that 15 years ago, everyone was predicting an ice age (which is false), and then he trotted out this thing that George Will said in his column, that there has been no warming in the last 12 years. But that's been shown to be false, and George Will just got his facts wrong, and the Washington Post just refused to correct it, even though they admitted it was incorrect. But here's this guy, carrying along this false idea because George Will said it. And the interviewer was just eagerly lapping it all up. Probably because the truth is so desperate?

And I was suddenly not only raging, but seriously discouraged. Because getting to work on this problem (and the related King Rat of all the other appalling problems facing us today) is so imperative, so crucial, and so obvious to me, that I can't even comprehend how someone could fail to see it, much less argue against it.

So I went and bought stuff to make home-brew beer and I came home. And I puttered around with my vegetable starts and checked on the asparagus bed. And I picked my dog's nose (poor Smokey and his pneumonia). And I turned on the radio, and it was the 'plague report' about the swine flu in Mexico. So I turned that off, and listened to DMB instead. But then it was the dodo song, and so I turned that off too. And I went out back and checked on my chickens. And then I came back in and I made a big chart on a big piece of newsprint of all the things I'm afraid of, and then I shredded it and put it in the chicken coop for them to shit on.

And now I feel better.

A little.