Year 3, Month 10, Day 16: Our Love Is Here To Stay?

The McCook Daily Gazette (NE) reports on a panel discussion featuring a bunch of frantic hippies:

LINCOLN, Nebraska — Things are about to start heating up.

So say a panel of five environmental scholars and professionals, who presented “Climate Change and Nebraska: What Does Our Future Hold?” Saturday at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln to warn of the dangers of a potential four-to-10 degree temperature increase in the state.

The speakers examined the scientific evidence for climate change, the impact this could have on the future and the steps that can be taken to assuage it. Robert Oglesby, a professor of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at UNL, said after considering all the factors, the one that is the cause for most alarm in Nebraska is the reduction of snowpack in the Rocky Mountains.

“We need that steady release of water due to the slow, steady melt of the snow in the spring through early summer to maintain river flow of the Platte,” Oglesby said.

Song Feng, of the School of Natural Resources at UNL, offered a study into the effect droughts have had in the United States and the likelihood of their continuation in the future.

“The drought will become the normal condition by the end of the century,” Feng said.

It’s going to get harder and harder to be a denialist in the years ahead. Won’t stop ’em, though. Sent October 9:

While it makes a good opening for an article on the findings of climate scientists, “things are about to start heating up” is a pretty misleading sentence. The mercury’s been rising for quite a while now, as witness this single statistic: July 2012 was the 329th consecutive month to exceed the global average temperature for the twentieth century. While this increase is bad news for us all, we can still make it worse — by rejecting the reality of global warming, and by blocking action until catastrophic consequences are unavoidable.

It’s impossible to imagine a more cynical and destructive approach to governance than the deny-and-delay strategy that is the modus operandi of conservative politicians when it comes to addressing the climate crisis. Self-styled “deficit hawks” who claim that reducing our greenhouse emissions would be prohibitively expensive are essentially telling us that prevention costs more than cure — a notion both logically absurd and morally bankrupt.

We cannot afford further inaction on climate change.

Warren Senders

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