Oil company operative, professional climate change denier (all the prominent climate change deniers are paid) and former Vice President Dick Cheney once said, “If there is even a 1 percent chance of terrorists getting weapons of mass destruction we must act as if it was a certainty.”
Nothing has terrorized more Americans since 9/11 as much as the wildfires that raged through California last year, yet before the ashes had cooled, climate change deniers led by denier-in-chief Donald Trump began a full-throated claim that poor forest management was responsible for the horror.
He made odd raking motions to demonstrate we need to keep the forest floor cleaner. While raking the forest floor would provide excellent first jobs for millions of young Mexican and Central American immigrants, the problem is not forest management. It is climate change.
American agencies NASA and NOAA affirm it. Across the globe in latitudes similar to California, extreme heat, drought and wildfire are presenting the same problems. Portugal and Greece in the north and Australia and Tasmania in the southern latitudes have all experiencedunprecedented heat, drought and severe fire outbreaks in recent years.
Adelaide, Australia recorded a midsummer high temperature of 116 F on Jan. 24, the highest temperature ever recorded in a major Australian city. December 2018 was the hottest December and January 2019 was the hottest month ever recorded in Australia.
Also in a latitude range close to California’s, the glacier system of the Himalayan mountains stores more fresh water than anywhere on Earth other than the polar ice caps. The glaciers are rapidly melting. Seven of the major rivers in Asia originate there. Several billion people depend on them for life itself.
The loss of Himalayan water would cause the greatest calamity in human history. The premise of global warming is that chiefly carbon dioxide from human activity but also methane and other gases form a barrier in the outer atmosphere, creating a “greenhouse effect” that traps the heat that naturally radiates outward from Earth, thereby warming the planet and creating climate changes that are far less hospitable for human and other life.
Like the frog in the pot, it feels like a slow-moving crisis but it is moving much faster than we and most other living things can adapt to without massive loss of life and brutal dislocation.
Generously funded by the oil billionaire Koch brothers, in 2008 Richard Muller, a theoretical physicist at the University of California, Berkeley, and a fierce, anti-climate change critic set out, “rationally and methodically,” to prove that climate change science was a load of blarney.
In 2012 Muller released his findings. He said, “Global warming is real and it is caused by humans.” Like O.J. Simpson searching for the “real killer,” paid climate change denier Rush Limbaugh and his conspiracy theorist followers claim to seek “real science.” Climate change denial is a perilous, time-wasting distraction.
The mathematical and scientific skill and expertise of NASA personnel has landed men and vehicles on the moon and vehicles with scientific equipment on Mars. Recently they landed a spacecraft on a distant asteroid and will return it to Earth with a soil sample.
The evidence NASA and NOAA have produced to support the premise of carbon emission driven global warming is overwhelming.
Marty Ansley
Cinebar
