environment: denialism glaciers
by Warren
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Month 9, Day 20: Damoclean Living
The Washington Post ran an article on a small town in France that is well worth reading.
The people of Saint-Gervais daily confront a very precarious situation. Perched above their heads is a huge mass of liquid water trapped inside a slowly melting glacier. If things get too warm, a catastrophic flood could wipe out their village with only a few moments’ notice. Adequate risk assessment and amelioration are all but impossible; nobody has ever seen a situation like this before. The proposed solutions present problems of their own, posing almost as much risk as inaction — and many of Saint-Gervais’ citizens, finding it too uncomfortable, simply deny the facts of the crisis. It is rare to find such an elegantly eerie microcosm of our planetary condition; with the terrifying threats of global climate change looming over us, we have all become citizens of Saint-Gervais, our population — and our peril — amplified a millionfold.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: Boston Herald denialism idiots James Inhofe
by Warren
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Month 2, Day 21: Setting The Wreckers Straight
Figured I’d send this one off to the Boston Herald. They haven’t printed anything of mine yet, of course, but I figure it does them good to hear from those of us on the Side of the Light. And you can’t go wrong trashing Jim Inhofe. That guy gives lying, hypocrisy and stupidity a really bad image.
Predictably, snowfall in Washington sets Republican politicians off on another round of climate-change denial. James Inhofe and his ilk would like us to believe that global warming doesn’t exist, that humans aren’t responsible, that localized cold and snow disprove it, and that in any case, doing something about it would cost too much and disrupt Americans’ God-given right to convenient, unthinking consumption. Wrong on all counts: worldwide measurements show indisputably that our climate is heating up, and ninety-seven percent of climate scientists agree that human activity is causing this. A warmer global climate means weirder local weather, including things like blizzards in Washington and Texas along with record highs in Greenland and Europe.
The sociopolitical effects of climate change include massive economic disturbances, “water wars,” and millions of climate refugees. It’s obvious that the cost of addressing the crisis is trivial compared to the cost of failure. Obvious, that is, to anyone except Senator Inhofe and the rest of the G.O.P.
Warren Senders
Have you written a letter recently? Why not?
As always, feel free to use one of mine.