Year 3, Month 1, Day 26: They Only Call It Controversial When They’re The Ones Stirring Up The Controversy

The Santa Fe New Mexican notes that not everybody is embracing the strategy of delay:

The debate over the causes of climate change continues to rage, but federal, state and tribal agencies aren’t waiting around for the argument to be settled. They believe climate change is here, and they’re working on ways to help wildlife, land and communities adapt.

Two federal agencies and a state wildlife department have developed a broad plan for helping ecosystems become more resilient as the climate changes.

The National Fish, Wildlife and Plants Climate Adaptation Strategy was released Friday by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the New York Division of Fish and Wildlife and Marine Resources. The public has until March 5 to comment on the plan.

“Climate change is already here,” according to the coalition’s website. “It is clear from current trends and future projections that we are now committed to a certain amount of changes and impacts, making climate adaptation planning a critical part of responding to this complex challenge.”

Glad to know that there are some people who don’t rely on FOX for their policy implementation. Written and composed on an airplane soaring above flyover country on my way back from California, to be mailed on landing in Boston — January 22:

There is no argument over the causes of climate change that needs to be “settled.”  There’s no dispute on this issue among climate scientists, who all agree that a runaway greenhouse effect caused by human CO2 emissions is essentially inevitable at this point.  Any “argument” is a fabrication of conservative political strategists and their corporate partners who fear that efforts to mitigate the damaging consequences of planetary warming will negatively impact their profit margins.  By manufacturing a controversy where there is none, these malefactors of great wealth (to apply Theodore Roosevelt’s term) have diluted the force of public opinion on the subject and abetted a strategy of delay. When ninety-seven percent of climatologists (who are after all the experts on the subject) agree on the essentials of an existential threat to our species and our planet, our government needs to heed their advice, without considering problematic political consequences.

Warren Senders