Month 12, Day 25: Merry Christmas!

The Independent (UK) runs a discussion on the likelihood that Europe’s winters are going to get more and more severe…while Greenland and the Arctic ice cap continue to melt. It’s a good article!

The idea that an increase in planetary temperatures could increase the severity of European winters is just one of the many counterintuitive notions accompanying the gradually metastasizing climate crisis. While people not distracted by short-term phenomena are alarmed by the daily passing of ever more significant climatic tipping points, those who cannot differentiate between weather and climate cite each and every local cold snap as evidence that scientists’ prognostications are full of hot air. The burgeoning intellectual growth industry of global warming denial is largely funded by multinational oil corporations — which thus stand revealed as incomprehensibly myopic. One would expect the world’s most powerful economic entities to be capable of planning for the long run, to recognize the impact on profit margins of a world whose infrastructure, agriculture and politics have been rendered unrecognizable by climate chaos. Their abject incompetence is weirder by far than an extra-cold European winter.

Warren Senders