By Steve Hynd
Go read UK Independent correspondent Johann Hari"s great post at HuffPo. It's excellent. I'll give you the first two grafs:
Thank god man-made global warming was proven to be a hoax. Just imagine what the world might have looked like now if those conspiring scientists had been telling the truth. No doubt NASA would be telling us that this year is now, so far, the hottest since humans began keeping records. The weather satellites would show that even when heat from the sun significantly dipped earlier this year, the world still got hotter. Russia's vast forests would be burning to the ground in the fiercest drought they have ever seen, turning the air black in Moscow, killing 15,000 people, and forcing foreign embassies to evacuate. Because warm air holds more water vapor, the world's storms would be hugely increasing in intensity and violence -- drowning one fifth of Pakistan, and causing giant mudslides in China.
The world's ice sheets would be sloughing off massive melting chunks four times the size of Manhattan. The cost of bread would be soaring across the world as heat shriveled the wheat crops. The increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere would be fizzing into the oceans, making them more acidic and so killing 40 percent of the phytoplankton that make up the irreplaceable base of the oceanic food chain. The denialists would be conceding at last that everything the climate scientists said would happen -- with their pesky graphs and studies and computers -- came to pass.
Now, while all the indications are that this climate change is human-driven, it's not proven. Does that make a difference? Shouldn't we be working to save as many lives and livelihoods anyway, no matter whether the root cause is human or sunspots or some other thing? Of course we should.
And just suppose all the talk turns out to be false hype and we as a planet work hard to put in place clean water and reneweable energy and crops that feed the hungry and international structures that defuse war and violence "for no good reason". So? Wouldn't doing those things be a valuable, ethical and humanitarian endevour even if we weren't talking about climate change as a driver of human chaos and misery?
It seems to me that this is not a zero-sum game. But I'm just a DFH singing "Kumbaya", I suppose.
Sorry, my excuse is I'm drinking Irish whiskey on the balcony and gettin picky, but I think, Hari works for the Independent. Doesn't take away from your note though.
ReplyDeleteNo, you're right. Thanks for the copy-edit (again). I'll fix it :-)
ReplyDeleteRegards, Steve