Meta Cognition

By Dean Steinberg

So last week the U.N. came out with their most comprehensive, declarative, and unwavering update on climate change ever. The basic message is that now there is IRREFUTABLE proof that the planet is headed for catastrophe. Done. Case closed.  Yet, as recent as this past weekend, I had a conversation with someone I deemed to be an intelligent soul, arguing that we still don't know if the warming is do to human consumption, and actually this moron was still debating if the planet was warming at all, or “just going through one of its cycles.”

Man, does this shit frustrate me. This guy I was arguing with has two small children. That's what I really can't wrap my head around. How people like this, parents, all the conservative right wing organizations like Family First, or the Family Coalition, or any of the right Wing Conservative Family types who still argue against Global Warming. Where do they think their grandchildren are going to live when the stages of global calamity are upon us? Actually, the World Meteorological Organization (the ones who've been studying this shit for 30 years) has indicated this will happen before the end of the century, so it may be their children as well as grandchildren.

Now I am far from any genius on this stuff. I only know what I see, hear, and feel. Like last time I was in Australia, been there lately? Remember that cool attraction called the Great Barrier Reef, well it's like not that cool anymore. As in disappearing not cool. I saw more fish the last time I was in Cabo and the skippers on the boat were throwing tortillas off the bow, than I did in Australia. Along with Canada, and of course the United States, Australia is still denying the presence of Global warming. I guess that shouldn't surprise anyone. Australians, while super friendly sorts, are not the most ahead of their time.  I used to have nothing but mad love for those Aussies, it is the homeland of my two children, Australian Cattle dogs, but I should have known that something was up when I was there last year and the waiter in the restaurant asked if Los Angeles is up on adding Chicken to the classic Caesar salad for a new delicacy.

Back to the geniuses, yeah, I'm not one of them. Not on Physics, or topography, or ice caps, or whatever it is these super freaks stay up all night analyzing, but what I am a genius in is Meta cognition, which is knowing what you don't know. What I do with that with which I don't know, is refer to those who do. And these left brain MIT nerds seem to know plenty. Hell, most of them study the shit for seventy plus hours a week for like their whole lives. What a silly, stupid presumptuous bunch we are, to think that these scientists, working at the most brilliant universities in the world, are bullshitting us. I read a lot on this topic, and the consensus is that pretty much ALL of them, the whole bunch of brilliant scientists at MIT, and Harvard, and Yale, and so on, all say the same thing. It's real bad out there.

So all you fossil fuel lovers, who are still clinging to your sad sack rhetoric, like, “there's more ice in Antarctica then ever,” or, “the climate may be changing, but human activity has nothing to do with it,” or, “whatever happens, we can adapt,” or, “the pace of warming has slowed in the past 15 years,” go fire up your Hummers, but while your at it, help those children of yours figure out a way to help their children grow some Gills.