I've spent a bit of time this morning going through my unread blogs, of which there are many. One pointed me at this page: GREENIE WATCH - which is an anti-left, anti-green page. My initial reaction is to this is to think that the person is wrong and this is just another weirdo who has made up his mind and then searches throughout the media to find people to validate his opinion. But, to be honest, who the fuck am I? I’ve read some articles that quote studies to prove that global warming is bad and here and so on. I’ve watched TV shows that explain that if global warming DID come, it would be very bad. I’ve seen plenty of data that shows that IF trends hold the way they are going, then by 2050 (or whatever) the map of the world will have a lot more red on it than it does today and that it will have a lot less green or yellow.

I’ll tell you what I haven’t done. I haven’t gone and read the studies first hand. I haven’t looked at past journals to see how the data is trending. I haven’t even read the sources for the contrary opinions to see if they’re valid (or where they are flawed, if they are!). I’m basically the exact same as the strawman “weirdo” that I portrayed this guy to be. I made a decision that messing up our earth would be a Bad Thing™, and decided that avoiding that at all costs would be a Good Thing™.

What would my response be if you confronted me on this? I’d probably launch into a big discussion about how there’s way too much information in the world and you ultimately have to trust a certain set of sources to be an aggregator for you. But that’s only part of the problem. It’s not that I’m too busy to do go and research all these things, though if you asked me straight out, I probably would give that as the reason I didn’t do the research myself. Especially when I spent last night playing Ghost Recon (which is really just ok, I’m not fond of the way they implemented squad game play), re-organizing some drives in my computer and watching Alias (which was pretty good, but come on… another twist about that Project Christmas and her birth?). I don’t have a decent reason AT ALL for me not properly researching global warming or a thousand other things. It just seems like a diminishing return for me to evaluate the study first hand and quote that instead of the article. Yet if you were to ask me about this, or a thousand other subjects, I’ll quote the articles and the tv shows and the sources I do have at my disposal, and quote them as fact. And I’ll convince myself that if I was even in a position to actually make a decision based on these subjects, because I was mayor or governor or whatever, that I would actually read the studies myself and make an informed decision. But the chances of that (let alone the chances of me being mayor or governor) are vanishingly small.

Just warning you.