It’s easy to shut down arguments about environmental policy made by scientists. In fact, it only takes one word: “alarmist.”
It’s what Republican politicians, particularly Gov. Rick Scott, Sen. Marco Rubio and former Gov. Jeb Bush, use to derail arguments about rising sea levels in Florida — an undeniable reality, PBS Newshour reported.
Rising sea levels around the world are connected to global warming, scientists said. National Geographic reported that “the burning of fossil fuels and other human and natural activities has released enormous amounts of heat-trapping gas into the atmosphere.” As a result, three factors have contributed to the increase of sea levels, thermal expansion, the melting of glaciers and global ice caps and ice loss from Greenland and Antarctica.
Ice loss in areas thousands of miles away has an immediate effect on South Florida. According to PBS, “‘This is not a future problem. It’s a current problem,’” said Leonard Berry, director of the Florida Center for Environmental Studies at Florida Atlantic University and a contributing author of the National Climate Assessment, which found that sea levels have risen about 8 inches in the past century.
And yet, even as Miami is poised to spend $400 million on “an elaborate pumping system to cope with routine flooding,” Marco Rubio claimed that surface temperatures on Earth “have stabilized.”
PolitiFact Florida was quick to debunk his statement. They ruled it “Mostly False.”
In his original statement, he said he never denied that climate change was a reality. However, he said, “How much is it changing and how much of it is directly attributable to human carbon emission? There is no consensus on that, which is why the models vary so greatly, which is why, despite 17 years of dramatic increases in carbon production by humans, surface temperatures (on) the Earth have stabilized.”
Scientists weighed in, and while surface temperatures have paused the increase over the past 16 or 17 years, the devil is in the details — “stabilized” implies that the worst is over.
All the experts PolitiFact interviewed, who represented NASA, the University of Miami, Rutgers and more echoed the same sentiment: The rate that the globe has been heating will pick up again, and stabilization won’t occur for another 10 or 20 years. The Earth’s temperatures haven’t stabilized at all — they’ve simply paused.
Politicians regularly cherry-pick facts to support their agenda. That’s why we have organizations like PolitiFact, after all. But when will Rubio and other Florida politicians stop positing themselves as experts in the field of environmental studies, listen to what the real researchers are saying and start creating policy? Florida needs the kind of $400 million projects that Miami is undergoing, but it also needs a solution for the long term. Those solutions won’t come as a result of denial and false senses of security.
[A version of this editorial ran on page 6 on 6/10/2014 under the headline "Inconvenient truth: Politicians aren’t smarter than scientists"]
