Over the weekend, I discussed the way that atheists often fetishize science and overstate its power. But better that than the total disregard for any inconvenient science that gets in the way of the religious fundamentalists’ Iron Age dogma. And pity the once great empire that relies on such nonsense to govern itself. It will find itself needing to relearn how to smelt metal. Good people of America, I offer for your consideration and concern: Senator James Inhofe of Oklahoma.

Inhofe is known for his highly publicized claims that global warming is a hoax. Does he actually know any science? Of course not! But it doesn’t take much to go to The Heartland Institute website and grab a bunch of cherry-picked data and argue that global warming is just a communist plot to trick people into believing collective action is sometimes necessary. (Funny how conservatives never have a problem with the draft!) But Inhofe’s interest is not in the modern science but in the “science” of the 6th century BC.

Earlier this month, Right Wing Watch caught Inhofe on Crosstalk, a show on Voice of Christian Youth America. He explained that climate change just couldn’t be happening because God wouldn’t allow it. Again, this is because an Iron Age book, put together by countless writers, tells him so:

Three thousand years ago, people told stories around the fire at night. Someone wrote them down after hundreds of years. And James Inhore is now using those stories to explain that science is just a great big hoax. It’s an entirely typical game that he is playing. The fundamentalists know that they can’t be honest and just admit that they believe what they believe because they learned it in Sunday school when they were six. Instead, they pretend to do science. It is despicable.

If this isn’t depressing enough, Digby brought my attention to a recent Public Religion Research Institute poll. It asked what they thought the reason was for increased storms. Among white evangelicals, 49% said that they thought it was due to global warming. That’s actually pretty good. But here’s the freaky part: 77% thought that it was a sign of the End Times. This would not be a problem if these people were living in a cave somewhere. But they probably vote more consistently than readers of this blog. I think I might make a bumper sticker, “I’m a religious freak: And I vote!”

I’m sure if you asked Joni Ernst, the new Iowa Senator-elect, she would provide the same answer. But for the media to report on her extremist views during the campaign would have been rude. So the media do what they always do: error on the side of allowing right wing extremists to get away with everything. After all, there was reporting to be done on her challenger’s fight with his neighbors over chickens. We’ve got to stay focused on what’s important. And the fourth estate knows what’s important: total nonsense. But don’t worry: it will all work out fine. If you’re super rich.

I’m going to talk about the social disruption that will result from global warming and how the power elite will try to maintain the status quo, causing countless unnecessary deaths in the name of them keeping their privilege. But before I get to that, I want to provide you with how I got to thinking about this. You see, recently I was watching Monty Python and the Holy Grail. You may remember one of the best things about the film is that the opening credits are done in the style of an Ingmar Bergman film, and so there are repeated references to Sweden and moose. But then, the titles are changed to that of a Latin American film and instead of moose, we get llamas.

For example, one of the executive producers is, “‘Ralph’ the Wonder Llama.” And of central importance to us, one of the director credits is to, “14 North Chilean Guanacos (Closely Related to the Llama).” I had to look this up. And indeed, it is true. The guanacos are of the genus Lama — Latin for llama, I assume. They live in southwest South America. And most notably, they manage to live on the western edge of the Atacama Desert — the driest desert in the world outside of the polls. The average rainfall is about a half inch per year. But there are some weather stations in the desert that have never received any rainfall for over half a century.

So how do the guanacos survive in this place? Well, they mostly don’t. They only live near the coast. The cold ocean air hits the hot land and fog forms. This moisture is captured by the cacti and the guanacos eat the cacti. And that is how they survive. So the guanacos can only survive in perhaps 1% of the Atacama Desert. And I thought that was rather a good analogy of what we are doing to the earth as we ignore global warming.

As I talk about all the time, the biggest problem with global warming is almost certainly what it is going to do to rainfall patterns. A warmer world should actually create more rainfall. The problem is that both the models and long-term precipitation-temperatures correlations show that global warming will mostly decrease rainfall where we need it: over land. A lot more rainfall over the oceans really doesn’t help much. Decreased rainfall is going to make areas where there still is adequate rainfall far more valuable. The world will be like the Atacama Desert: plenty of land where we can’t survive and little land where we can.

What will happen then? Well, there have been water wars in the past. And as Shane Harris discussed in Foreign Policy recently, Water Wars, “The new conflicts of the future could be sparked by climate change.” I can see this working internationally and intranationally. I can easily see the United States invading Canada to get its farm land in a century. Of course, it won’t be sold that way. I’m sure The New York Times and other mainstream media outlets will be as willing as ever to spin whatever yarn the government is feeding them about the existential threat those francophiles in Quebec represent.

But also, as always, the rich will take the best land and everything that results from that. And the poor will be pushed to the margins. The argument in favor of private ownership of land is pretty weak. We aren’t talking about something that anyone built. It is literally true that you did not built that piece of earth. So when it comes to natural resources, we really do have a “might makes right” system where whoever owns a piece of land does so because of laws that privilege them.

This situation is bad enough today. But in a highly disrupted system caused by global warming, the situation will be much worse. Since the land that is considered valuable will change, we will see just how much billionaire Americans respect the land rights of poor people who win the geographic lottery. My guess is that we will see that they don’t believe in those rights all that much. At least, they won’t until they take control of the lands. Then land rights will be unquestioned. I only say this because it is how it has always gone.

At some point, every piece of land was stolen. The American obsession with land rights is just a way for the rich to maintain their power. The moment that it isn’t to their advantage, they will simply take what is not theirs. Afterward, they will pretend that their land ownership is righteous. Just like they do today.

I have lived a long and colorful life — causing myself far more pain that I was born to. Yet the most painful thing I have ever been through was a case of herpes zoster — “shingles.” For five days, I was in so much pain that I did not sleep except for passing out for a few minutes here and there. The thing about shingles is that it is caused by a virus. I finally made it to a doctor on the fifth day and they put me on some kind of antiviral drug. And it was amazing — in its total uselessness.

This only highlights just what amazing things antibiotics are. If it weren’t for antibiotics, I would be dead. At least once they saved my life and maybe more than that. So it truly is remarkable that we have these largely generic drugs that are so highly effective. And it shouldn’t surprise us that doctors give them out like candy. It is a form of defensive medicine that actually has potentially deadly aspects.

I’m not talking about the antibiotic resistance that taking the drug creates, although that is certainly an issue. Instead, I’m talking about an article by Aaron Carroll, On an Antibiotic? You May Be Getting Only a False Sense of Security. In it, he noted that doctors often don’t know if the disease they are treating is caused by bacteria. He started with an extreme example:

But this seems to be pretty typical. Here, the doctors thought that Thomas Eric Duncan had a sinus infection. The problem with that is that sinus infections are usually viral, not bacterial. So even if Duncan had had a sinus infection, the doctors probably didn’t treat it properly, “Yet antibiotics are regularly prescribed in this manner.” And the issue isn’t just with the people treated.

Carroll is a pediatrician and so he is very familiar with conjunctivitis — “pink eye.” The general rule is that children with this disease are not allowed back at school until they’ve been on antibiotics for 24 hours. One of the problems with this rule is that pink eye is usually caused by a virus. But even when it isn’t, “Drugs simply work differently in different people.” He noted that people with pink eye could be contagious up to ten days after they start a course of antibiotics! The bottom line:

So what do we do about this? Carroll doesn’t have much of a recommendation other than for doctors to recognize that they often prescribe antibiotics more for themselves than for their patients. But I have a thought that has nothing to do with medicine. I think the problem is that our culture has changed in ways that are hurting us. It isn’t just that we pretend that everything must get done now now now! (I have friends who work for content providers and they are on deadline constantly; there is no normalcy.) But the bigger issue, I think, is that now most households have two people who work outside the home. So it is really important to get the kids back to school. It’s madness. And it is probably killing us in more ways than one.

On a personal level, you might want to make sure that what your doctor is giving you is correct. But even if it is, it doesn’t mean you aren’t contagious. Streptococcal pharyngitis – “strep throat” — which is treated really well by antibiotics, doesn’t do much to stop it from spreading from the patient. So try to slow down and spend a little time alone. Learn to meditate. Or start a blog! The two are really not that different.

Afterword

I want to be clear that I think who manages the home ought to be a couple’s choice. But the big problem is that most jobs don’t pay enough to support a family anymore. I find it interesting that conservatives spend so much time whining about the dissolution of the family, yet they aren’t willing to support economic policies that would facilitate family cohesion. Managing a household is a full time job. We have two income families now because the business community wants higher profits and the government has enforced policies to assure that. It isn’t that way because the American family was just itching to have someone else raise its kids.

Over at Vox this morning Brad Plumer reports, São Paulo Is the 7th Largest City in the World. And It’s About to Run Out of Water. It is experiencing “the worst drought in eight decades.” It really is bad: the city’s reservoirs are down to 5% of their capacity and there have been intermittent and widespread water outages. The proximate cause is that the region has received only 40% of the rainfall it normally does and the water utility had refused to implement water rationing, preferring anemic “free market” measures.

As for the more substantive reasons for the drought, Climate Central points to global warming and deforestation, which of course are related. Right now, here in California, we are in a similar situation. And in our case, it seems to be all global warming. Historical correlations between temperature in precipitation in the vast majority of the United States is negative — and it is particularly so here in California.

My concerns about global warming has always been focused on rainfall. The evil irony is that a warmer world will produce more rain, but it does so primarily over the oceans. So there are potentially devastating effects on agriculture, and those effects are going to harm the United States a lot. As for California, I won’t be surprised at all if in a hundred years, it is a ghost state because we just don’t have the water to support 38 million people. But I’m surprised that São Paulo is being so affected. It is on the edge of a forest and close to the coast. But that’s the thing about all the carbon we’ve pumped into the atmosphere — it is an experiment we are conducting on the planet, and we have little idea just how it is going to work out in its specifics.

Meanwhile, Andrea Thompson at Climate Central reported, Hot News: 2014 On Track to Become Warmest Year. It follows from an announcement by the National Climatic Data Center that following September being the warmest on record that we are “likely” to see 2014 be the warmest year. Even if the last three months are just as warm as the average of the years 2000 – 2013, it will tie with the warmest year.

But it is madness that we are even talking about this. Forget 2014. The warmest year on record: 2010. Second warmest: 2005. Third warmest: 1998. This last one is the only non-21st century year on the list of the ten warmest years on record. I’m again reminded of the caribou. The lack of wolves caused the species to get over-populated in Newfoundland. The caribou were so successful that they were destroying their habitat and starving, so wolves had to be reintroduced.

We need some wolves, but not to keep our population in check. We need wolves to keep our global capitalism in check. I’m not saying that we need to harm the economy. We are not turning a blind eye to global warming because the people or even the capitalists generally want that. We are doing it because there is one industry that has a huge incentive to stop us from doing anything about global warming: the fossil fuel industry. And they have enormous resources to create doubt. So yes, we are destroying the planet because about ten thousand people all over the world want to hang onto their current profits, which are almost all dependent upon externalities.

Any individual human would behave better. The current conservative line on global warming would be seen as irrational in an individual. Consider a man who said, “Unless you can prove to me that I’m going to die before my children are grown, I’m not going to buy any life insurance!” And the same conservatives who say we can’t do anything about global warming unless we know, also say that they must be allowed to carry a gun with them at all times just in case. I understand the philosophical thread: conservatives don’t believe in collective action. But the fact remains that we all have far more to worry about regarding global warming than we do lone gunmen. (Or black helicopters!)