Green?

I have this ongoing struggle to find ways to fill my continuing education requirements to keep up my engineering license. Most classes are expensive, boring (let's be honest here) and inconvenient to get to, not to mention they require finding copious amounts of childcare. So when I saw a post on our homeschool list that the Manhattan Libertarian Party was offering some free passes to a Climate Change Conference in Times Square I was SO in. It never crossed my mind that it wasn't a pro-environment conference. Since most of my engineering work involved stormwater design, anything related to climate change is relevant and actually interesting to me and even at other big engineering conferences there is generally at least something on climate change.
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My first commute to the Marriott was interesting--I found myself nervous and not sure what to expect. I was bringing a baby to a conference. Was I nuts? Simon was coming down with a cold, was fussy and clingy and I just didn't feel like I could spend that much time away from him at the moment. We missed all windows of offering bottles, just like with the other 2 kids, so I knew if I left him I would end up preoccupied the entire time.
I joined a sea of people on their way to work. Suits. Newspapers. Coffee. Walking through Times Square is a lot of energy at any point in the day or night, but being swept along with a tide of people who belong is intense. How many days do you have to do this before you stop gawking at the signs? It is like Las Vegas.
Anyways, Simon did great, but it was tiring at points to keep him occupied so that I could listen. He spent a lot of time in the back of a room playing with little collections of toys that I had packed for the day. The minute he started "talking" I would walk out the door with him, loitering and trying to listen. I had many people compliment him and me for bringing him. When hour upon hour of listening to someone's statistics became a recipe for head bobbing, countless attendees sought us out for a game of peekaboo or to tell me about their kids or grandkids at home. When Simon grew restless, we did what all attendees of big conferences do--we got our shoes shined, watched the elevators in the cathedral-like atrium (since they looked like rockets), we swiped mini jars of honey and tea for later and we nabbed the freebies from the exhibit hall (playing cards! pens! pads of paper!).
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What I didn't expect was to be so interested in the speakers. The opening talk was by the President of the Czech Republic. There were people from NASA, NOAA, countless Universities, a retired astronaut. There were meteorologists, physicists, engineers, congressmen, statisticians, mathemeticians, doctors and journalists. The overriding message was that humans are not contributing to global warming. The planet is warming, but it is because of ocean salinity, solar flares, winds, clouds, ocean currents...anything but human involvement. So these people feel that they are not respected by the "alarmists" who are tying up resources (money, time, mass hysteria that could better be spent on other things) and are working to show their research to the world. There were a lot of Al Gore, United Nations IPCC and Obama jokes. I don't know if they noticed that I wasn't laughing.
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It was an interesting exercise in mindfulness and tolerance to attend a 3 day conference in which you are the minority. At first I was won over. Their science was impressive. But then the rhetoric became tiresome and annoying and it sounded more like whining than merely trying to achieve integrity. They actually used phrases like "the enemy" (that would be anyone with a blog whose title includes the phrase "tree huggers") and the quotes and capital letters surrounding "The Liberals" might as well have been written in neon lights for all the emphasis they were allowed. I realized that out of the 4 tracks the ran for the length of the conference, one entire track was devoted to economics and politics. This was much more than neutrally reporting scientific findings--there was an active component of trying to achieve political influence.
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So I walked away from this definitely richer for the experience. I am grateful to have attended and I learned a lot. OK, maybe I think now that global warming is not really influenced by humans. I think I'm going to remove the Inconvenient Truth link from my favorite sites list. But I still think we should recycle, buy organic and try to reduce our ecological footprint. I don't see how our involvement in warming or not excuses us from these other issues. I wish everyone could put down their political agenda for long enough to listen to people who have done good research. For the record, I'm registered as an Independent, and there are issues with which I agree wholeheartedly with every party. Nobody but a Green Party candidate could reflect my issues on the environment, but I'm fiscally Conservative. Nobody but a Libertarian could possibly understand my fierce independence on issues such as homeschooling or having a baby by myself in my apartment, but my most impassioned voting issues remain those social issues that I wish weren't part of the docket but are, and for these I look to the Democrats. I know a lot more about the IPCC now than I did last week, but I still have stars in my eyes about the U.N. We are even going next week, on a field trip for a tour.
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So, climate change junkies. You had me with your science. But you sort of lost me with your plotting and scheming and your persistant putting down "the other side". I don't want us to define our sides so firmly, I have a feeling the borders are more blurry than you think.