If we reject facts this won't end well; it'll just end
I’m just back from Boston, having accompanied my wife to her 50th college reunion. There, classmate Al Gore spoke about, no surprise, climate change.
Nothing he said was surprising, though; not to those who’ve read the science and are awake to the disinformation campaign from polluters and their payees, which makes Big Tobacco’s campaign against cancer-causation seem like George Washington’s cherry-tree confessional.
The science is clear. Everything happening has been predicted by climate scientists; their errors only in underestimating speed and severity. Drought, floods, cataclysmic rainstorms, stronger hurricanes, the Polar Vortex sending frigid air to North America, changes in ocean currents. Record-breaking heat, bone-chilling cold. Across the planet, it’s affecting food and water supplies, creating climate refugees by the millions, inflaming politics here and abroad.
Honduras, for example, is among the countries most affected by climate change; from the resulting poverty and hunger, citizens flee to our borders. As with his policies in other areas, Trump’s climate denial makes our immigration problem worse.
Iran, which Trump pretends wants war, is suffering climate-related disasters. Deluges inundate homes and buildings, wash cars and buses down city streets like corks, even as overheated farms die. A country suffering such conditions seems unlikely to attack us.
Among Gore’s slides was a picture from space, of Earth and its tiny atmosphere. Our planet is rare fruit with the thinnest of peels; into this fragile layer of life-support we dump 40 billion tons of pollutants yearly. The heat energy added to the planet by human activity is the equivalent of 500,000 Hiroshima-type atom bombs. Every. Single. Day. If, as some say, only God can affect climate, that’s how He’s doing it.
The morning after Gore’s lecture, the New York Times reported Trump’s redoubling his ignorant attacks on climate science and President Obama’s carbon-pollution regulations. It’s madness. It’s dereliction of his sworn duty to protect Americans. Never mind his documented obstruction and attempted destruction of constitutional governance: this alone deserves impeachment. It’s tantamount to premeditated murder.
https://www.heraldnet.com/opinion/schwab-if-we-reject-facts-this-wont-end-well-itll-just-end/?utm_source=DAILY+HERALD&utm_campaign=de255b829a-RSS_EMAIL_CAMPAIGN&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_d81d073bb4-de255b829a-228635337
