Denial Gets you up a Crick

On a walk around the lake this morning, I saw a bald eagle perched on one of the dock pilings.  It's not the first time I've seen one at the lake, in fact last winter there were two hanging around at the same time.  It's becoming increasingly common to see them around here and pretty much all over the eastern United States.  But it wasn't always that way, when I was a kid, I grew up never seeing one our nation's most recognizable symbols in the wild.  Then I went to Alaska in 1991 and I saw bald eagles all over the place, and I came to the realization that they are not really the solitary residents of pristine wilderness that I had thought.
It turns out that human beings actually had a lot to do with the extirpation of bald eagles from large parts of the country, because of pesticides.  We didn't start out with the intention of making them disappear, we like them, unlike wolves, coyotes and bears (other extirpated species).  We wanted to still see the noble birds of prey, like bald eagles and osprey, soaring through our skies.  But we also don't like mosquitoes and various other crop pests that cost us a bunch of money, and we found this stuff dichlorodiphenaltrichloroethane or DDT for short (and man am I glad there's an abbreviation).
The DDT is demonstrably not toxic to higher order species in low doses, and even in some cases of acute exposure, it doesn't really seem too horrible, so A+, science has given us a miracle solution for bugs eating us and our crops!  Turns out, DDT is just gangbusters and getting rid of bugs, and it seems pretty safe otherwise, but it also has a rather persnickety quality: it bio-accumulates.  Which means the bugs die, but the DDT then enters the water supply and is absorbed by algae and other organisms on the bottom of the food chain, which are eaten by fish, which are eaten by, you guessed it: eagles.
The DDT doesn't kill the fish or the eagles, because it's largely non-digestible, it just sort of hangs around.  The fish are pretty fine, there doesn't seem to much of a down side for them living life with DDT coursing through their veins, and the birds that eat the fish seem okay too, except when it comes time to make new birds, the DDT affects the hardness of their eggshells.  Now, to be fair, we started using DDT as a pesticide in 1939, and environmentalism wasn't really much of a thing, outside of some rich white dudes who actually just wanted to make sure there would always be enough big game for them to shoot.  We weren't really paying that much attention to animals we couldn't eat.
Rachel Carson didn't write Silent Spring until 1962, and even then she was kind of just questioning whether some of the things we were up to were really that wise.  She didn't know about the egg thing, she just noticed that there seemed to be a lot fewer birds around than there used to be, and she had the audacity to think that we might have had something to do with that.
Ms. Carson woke some people up, and she also ticked some people off.  Which has been pretty much the dichotomous set of reactions that people have to bad environmental news.  It's either: "Wow, I didn't know we could cause this sort of a problem, how can we fix it?"  Or it's: "You're a big liar with all your science-y mumbo jumbo, the world is just too big for us to make that sort of a difference."
Look, my grandpa still had some jars of DDT in his garage when he died, because he was holding on to some of the "good stuff," in case he ever had some really pesky aphids or Japanese beetles.  I'm pretty sure he had heard the "story" of how it was killing the eagles, but he probably disbelieved it.  I loved my grandpa and he was entitled to his opinion, but his opinion was wrong, and if it had prevailed I still wouldn't be able to see a bald eagle just hanging around at the lake.
I really do believe that people are entitled to their opinion, up to a point.  The line is crossed when someone's opinion runs counter to facts, but not just any facts.  If your opinion is that Nickleback is a good band, you are entitled to that opinion, even though you are really, really wrong, you're not hurting anyone, unless I'm riding in your car and make me listen to Nickleback, but even then, your tone-deaf aesthetically bankrupt taste in music is not going to do irrevocable harm to the world that we're going to hand to our children and grandchildren, other than the fact that when people learn about the music of the 1990's they will think Nickelback was every bit as good as Pearl Jam.  It's misinformation, but it's not dangerous.
However, if your opinion is that DDT is fine, you're going to make it so my kids will only see bald eagles on money.  If your opinion is that our climate is not changing and that our rampant consumption of fossil fuels and attendant rise in atmospheric CO2 is not causing that change that isn't actually happening, then you are demonstrably wrong, by 99% of climate scientists.
It's hard to get 99% of any sort of scientist to agree on anything, that's the nature of science, they test hypotheses.  I'm pretty sure 99% never agreed about DDT, but we still banned it and now I see bald eagles at the lake.  Unfortunately, we are a little too addicted to fossil fuels and we're not going to be able to quit cold-turkey anytime soon.  But we have to start taking steps, or else we're going to cause our children and grandchildren a lot more trauma than never being able to see an eagle.
The good news is that we have learned a lot over the past 50 years, and we are starting to realize (at least some of us are) that we can, and should, try to fix the problems that our wanton ignorance has caused.  As of now there is no "cure" for climate change, but give us time, slow down, drive less, support sane legislative measures regarding the ecosystem, most of all stop pretending it's not happening.