Did we all miss a day of logic?

BBC NEWS Science/Nature Arctic sea ice melt 'even faster'

In the last few years I have been involved in many discussions on global warming. And almost all of us agreed on one thing: global warming = bad. What we did not agree on was why things were getting hotter. Which made absolutely no sense to me.

I'm not a scientist but I am pretty good at basic logic. It seems to me that after a hundred years of pumping filth into the atmosphere there would be some effect. Low and behold, since we started doing that the world has gotten hotter. Now, while that in an of itself does not prove a causal relationship, it is some pretty interesting circumstantial evidence. The other part of that is that we KNEW for a fact that the things we were pumping into the air had a tendency to make things hotter. See how these things can be put together pretty easily?

Now, we know all of this. And pretty much everybody has finally acquiesced and admitted - "Okay. We fucked up. Real bad." Why it took so long for so many people to realize that is a whole 'nother rant. But just today in class we talked (okay, I talked) about how science is political. It always has been. There has never been a time when science was pure. Which is both good and bad. Bad because seriously - what can we know for certain? Good for the same reason. Science is proof positive that we are TOTALLY constructing our reality as we go. Which is cool for me, since I have sort of based my career on that premise. And indicative of a pretty postmodern way of looking at things - if we admit science is political then we must admit that all of our notions of "fact" and "progress" have also been politicized.

And the result is that the world might be ending. Seriously. The world as we know it will not exist in 50 years - it will be a completely different place. And I'm not convinced it will be better. So how do we convince people to try and do something about it? More science? Rhetoric? Performance art?

All that is to say - I'm going to be really sad to see the Polar Bears go.