Month 9, Day 8: McNews.

When I did a search on “Pakistan” on the USA Today site, the top three listings all concerned Angelina Jolie. Maybe I should write a letter to her….

They ran an AP story on a farmer who’d gotten badly whacked by the flood, so I hung this letter on that.

Pakistan’s devastated agricultural infrastructure, like the droughts that have destroyed Russia’s wheat fields, is a tragic consequence of global climate change. Since the mid-1980s, climate scientists have predicted that higher concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere will increase the likelihood of catastrophic weather events. Unfortunately, corporate-funded denialists continue to receive equal coverage in our news media, despite the fact that the overwhelming majority of climatologists agree on global warming’s human cause. Although stories like Abid Hussein’s put a human face on the disaster in Pakistan, they fail to point out the role of climate change in making that disaster possible. What will it take for Americans to wake up to our responsibilities as the world’s foremost per capita emitter of carbon dioxide? Twenty million people’s lives have been turned upside down in Pakistan — and that’s just a preview of what’s in store for the world in the coming years.

Warren Senders