Year 2, Month 6, Day 10: Waking Up A Bit.

The Booneville Daily News has a pretty good editorial on the complications attendant on attempts to directly link awful weather with climate change:

You won’t receive a text message alerting you to start worrying about climate change. There will be no ransom note left at your door, warning of the natural disasters that will strike if you fail to comply.
It is the uncertain and ambiguous nature of how rising global average temperatures impact people around the planet that makes arguing for the need to take action on climate change a tough sell and scarier for it.

I’m heartened by voices from the heartlands rejecting denialist propaganda. Sent May 28:

While simplistic attempts to link tornadoes and climate change are easily debunked, so are the equally simplistic attempts to deny correlations between them. Both climate and weather are complex systems, making any attempt to state unambiguous relationships between these global and local phenomena profoundly flawed. But the difficulty of establishing direct causal links between the greenhouse effect and any specific weather event is not a rationale for inaction. The scientific consensus on climate change is overwhelming; the only “expert” voices denying either its dangers or its human causes turn out on examination to be those in the pay of corporations sociopathically reluctant to sacrifice future profits. The danger to us and future generations is very clear. Even if a particular catastrophe cannot be directly tied to your SUV’s CO2 emissions, we know that continuing with “business as usual” will load the climatic dice, making tragedies like Joplin’s ever likelier.

Warren Senders