2-24 FB Global Warming

 When I get comments back from you folks on the website in response to stories I do, sometimes I read them and do a little follow-up. So it is with someone named Richard Pauli who wrote an e-mail saying he appreciated a story that I did last month. The story said:  An agricultural scientist at Stanford University analyzed agricultural records of corn, rice, wheat, and soybeans from 1980 to 2008. Those four crops make up 75% of the calories consumed by the world's population. Worldwide, the authors report  yields of corn and wheat declined by 3.8% and 5.5%, respectively, compared with what they would have been without global warming.  So I called up Mr. Pauli: “I am a former high-tech worker at Microsoft and I am actively taking courses in climate change policy at the University of Washington. To what do you say to people that global warming is nothing but a bunch of nonsense? I say that is what I want to believe. For the last 5 or 10 years I have been wanting to find evidence of that but it isn’t there. I have a normalcy bias. Everybody wants their future to be good. Unfortunately we cannot let that bias keep ourselves from realizing what a real problem this is. It’s like smelling smoke in your house. When you wake up in the middle of the night and you smell smoke, there is that time that you have to investigate or you can go back to sleep. We should be very careful about listening to people who are asking us to go back to sleep.