If you look at all the destructive extreme weather buffeting the world this summer alone, it’s as if Mother Nature were saying to us: “Oh, you didn’t notice me tapping on your shoulder these past few years? O.K. Well, how about a little fire, Scarecrow? How about this:
“How about I bake Europe, set the biggest wildfire California has ever seen and more active wildfires — 460 in one day — than British Columbia has ever seen, and also start the worst forest fires in decades in Sweden, even extending north of the Arctic Circle where temperatures this month reached 86 degrees. Meanwhile, I’ll subject Japan to the heaviest rainfall it’s ever recorded, and then a couple weeks later the highest temperature it’s ever recorded — 106 degrees in Kumagaya, northwest of Tokyo. And for a punctuation mark, I’ll break the heat record in Death Valley, reaching 127 degrees, and burn the worst drought in living memory into Eastern Australia, where the BBC last week quoted a dairy farmer as saying, “It’s gotten to the point where it’s cheaper to shoot your cows than it is to feed them.”
Thomas L. Friedman is a columnist for The New York Times. He is pictured above. Right under his portrait is an excerpt from his August 15, 2018 column, "What if Mother Nature Is on the Ballot in 2020?"
Friedman suggests that Democratic Party candidates, in 2020, should be running on a "stop global warming" platform. It's good politics, he suggests.
Maybe it is (I'd like to hope so), but I have a comment. The dangers of global warming are real. See my blog post from yesterday. Friedman's list of the current evidence is compelling (and not all-inclusive). What is hanging in the balance is not whether or not the Democrats can "take the House back," which is the issue on which Friedman is focused. What is hanging in the balance is the survival, or not, of human civilization.
Demanding a response to global warming dangers?
Not just a political tactic!
Image Credit:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/raquelbaldelomar/2017/10/22/bono-and-thomas-friedman-reveal-three-skills-american-workers-need-today/#7f4b907225c8
As much as I attempt to avoid responding to climate change hysteria, I must respond to the subject of this post.
ReplyDeleteThomas Friedman is the foreign affairs Op-Ed columnist for the New York Times. His academic degrees are in Mediterranean and Middle East studies. He is not a scientist. He knows nothing about the technical and scientific aspects of climate dynamics, forest fire regimes historic weather and climate patterns.
There is nothing anyone can do, not even the awesome might of the United States of America, that will “stop climate change,” the most ignorant and revealing claim that Friedman makes. Climate change and climate variability are natural phenomenon beyond the control of human beings.
This summer’s forest fires are the result of decades of forest fire suppression, human population growth and expansion into forested areas, coupled with warm weather patterns resulted in dry forest conditions.
“Human civilization” is not threatened by climate change or even climate variability. What threatens human societies is unrestricted human population growth, unlimited human economic growth and expansion, unlimited human consumption of natural resources, unlimited human destruction of natural habitats and the species that inhabit them.
If Thomas Friedman really wants to do something political about real threats to human civilization, he should champion population control, an end to industrial capitalist economies, and and end to the military/security/corporate oligarchy that is laying waste to this planet and much of the life with which we share the leftovers.
We can’t do anything about climate change. We can do something about human stupidity.