Month 7, Day 13: Hey, Cosmo-boy! Listen Up!

I wanted to humiliate Scott Brown a little.

Dear Senator Brown,

It probably wasn’t on FOX, so you may have missed the news that Lake Superior is twenty degrees warmer than usual this year.

You may have missed the news that methane is thawing on the floor of the Arctic ocean and entering the atmosphere.

With all your other work as a Senator from Massachusetts, it might have escaped your notice that warmer waters off the Southern New England coast have devastated the lobster population to such an extent that a five-year fishing moratorium may be necessary.

Perhaps you haven’t had a chance to learn about the acidification of the world’s oceans, which threatens the food chain for over a billion people.

Maybe you didn’t get a chance to read that the distinguished Australian biologist Frank Fenner (the man whose work led to the eradication of smallpox) thinks climate change is likely to bring about the extinction of the human race by the end of this century.

Senator Brown, we can’t fight global climate change with the machinery of war. It’s not a force we can subdue with artfully crafted publicity. Nor is it something that will magically subside in the face of tax cuts for corporations and the upper income brackets.

Human-caused global warming is not something that might happen in the future; it’s something that’s happening right now, and its effects are emerging all over the country and all over the world. We need our Senate and our Senators to rise to this occasion. This is not a time to protect the world’s worst carbon polluters; this is a time to protect the world.

Vote for a robust climate bill.

Thank you,

Warren Senders