20/20 climate vision in 2020

As you can imagine pilots and good vision are thought of in concert. Much of our aviation training is centered around things that impair our vision. They can be things we eat and drink, sleep and rest discipline, how we set our cockpit lighting, and especially the tricks nature can pull on us when the visibility is bad at night or in the fog.

Pilots spend a lot of money on glasses. It is not all vanity. Our livelihoods depend on protecting our vision. Additionally, different tinted lens can markedly help bring into focus obstacles. I was especially fond of my yellow tinted Ray Bans for low light conditions. The science of vision enhancing eyeglasses is science appreciated by aviators.

Here is a short personal story about trying to see clearly.

One day on the North Slope we received a mission request to fly a small package out to an oil rig on a manmade island in the Beaufort Sea north of Deadhorse. The weather at the rig was foggy. We were a little apprehensive. There was no wind reported so we expected the water would be glassy. From our training we knew flying low over glassy water is dangerous. You cannot tell how high you are and there are numerous incidents of pilots fatally flying their aircraft into the water in these conditions.

We chose to fly on instruments using our radar and radar altimeter to guide us in. My co-pilot did a brilliant job of guiding me to the rig. We broke out at minimum altitude. As we broke out, we looked up to see the rig.  There it was… upside down!

We both had the same thought flash through our heads. We had somehow gone inverted and we had a milli-second to live. 

Lucky, we were too dumbfounded to do a thing and a second later we figured things out. What we were seeing was the perfect reflection of the rig in the mirror smooth water. The sight line to the rig itself was blocked by a low cloud. The joke was on us and later we had a good laugh.

Seeing well is not easy both literally and figuratively. To see well we must first educate ourselves in the basics just like the FAA and Army do with their aviators. Scientists, like the ones in the National Academies of Science, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, NASA, NOAA and at least 200 other top shelf science organizations have given us a clear picture of the consequences of burning fossil fuels.

Fossil fuel funded, media savvy think tanks, falsely posing as science organizations, have thrown up fog banks, iced over our windscreens of understanding, and placed low clouds obscuring our vision creating doubt in our mental vision of legitimate and well researched climate science. These organizations have been exceptionally successful at sowing their product, doubt. *

Many of the scientist’s predictions were based on computer models. We can examine these, using our 20/20 rear view vision.  The deniers accused the scientists of fear mongering and said there was no anthropogenic climate change. Today we know the deniers were lying. Rapid and destructive climate change is upon us advancing faster than the most pessimistic forecast.

Scientists continue to deliver to us information on climate change and, more importantly, the solutions. They give us glasses allowing us to peer into the future and make the changes necessary to avoid obstacles and survive.

Let’s not be Pollyanna about this. Just like my personal story, there are going to be a lot of surprises. Some harmless that we will laugh about, some enlightening expanding our understanding, and some inevitably tragic testing us. The Scientists cannot give us perfect 20/20 vision into the future. Climate scientists, the ones who have weathered the peer review of their fellow experts, have been 99% accurate. I assert given their track record we may want to bet our kid’s future on them rather than pundits, right wing think tanks, or conservative politicians (who have forgotten what conservation means.)  

Scientists can give us glasses to envision success. Of course, no set of glasses works well without the person wearing them having the courage to open their eyes.

PS: After we broke out, we landed the ship and gave the box to the oil rig expeditor. “What is in the box, a part for the computer.” I asked. My co-pilot and I had speculated it was a part for the computer running the drill.  Rumor had it if a rig shut down it cost oil companies a million dollars a day. Assuming this, we had pushed it a bit to get the box to the island.

 “No”, the expediter replied, “the boss ran out of peanut butter cups.”

*  Supportive reading:

 Merchants of Doubt, Naomi Oereskes and Erik M Conway

Climate Coverup, James Hoggan and Richard Littlemore

Blowout, Rachel Maddow     note: I have not read this new book. Others have referred it to me. On Amazon it had 1,564 reviews 91% of which are five stars.

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