The politicization of survival

 The preponderance of evidence for global warming - let's not use the PR-friendly term of "climate change" is overwhelming. One quick Google search for "global warming" brings up plenty of pages with news and evidence showing the data and the effects of global warming. Rain in the mountains of Greenland, extreme drought in the west and other parts of the globe, shrinking ice. Oh, and the actual measurements done by those pesky scientists who have shown a steady rise in temperatures over the past few decades. Oops. So, when people wake up to snow on the ground and say that global warming isn't really, they might want to get out weather records and look to see that snowfall amounts have diminished as well.

And yet, around half the people in America say that global warming isn't real or it's a natural process or it's a scam pushed by the elites to impoverish everyone and make themselves richer. Given that the elites seem to be doing just fine and scientists have ruled our natural processes, that all seems like a weak argument. Again, the data shows that it's really. Oops, oops, and oops. The breakdown of people who believe warming is real versus those who don't roughly corresponds to political party preference and opinion. A few cracks have appeared in that wall of opinion, probably by people whose crops have dried up or homes have been flooded. When reality takes a giant dump on your livelihood, it tends to get your attention.

Of course, it doesn't help when the people leading the messaging on global warming live in big houses and fly on private planes. On the right, I guess no one ever questions why the people claiming that global warming is false are making gobs of money off of fossil fuels, etc.

Anyway, the political divide is going to keep any kind of action from being taken on global warming. Survival of civilization, and maybe the species, is far less important that being able to get people into office with an R next to their name every couple of years.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Sleepy Joe's long slide

I'm not really sure what's been going on with Biden lately, but I don't see a single bit of the spark he used to have years ago. Go back to the Obama years and Joe was pretty much a firebrand, whatever you thought of his politics. I never saw the appeal to him as a candidate or politician, as he has essentially been nothing but a careerist schmoozer most of his life, not that it makes him any different from anyone else in Washington who has been around for decades. Knowledge of how to govern and good civics really has nothing to do with pressing the flesh and winning votes. Sometimes they overlap, but not often. I get the desire to so badly see Trump booted from office that running the person with name recognition and deep pockets and connections, whatever his weaknesses, seemed like the most desirable move. I don't have a lot to say about Trump as a president, because I don't think there was a lot there. Lots of bluster and bragging, not a lot to back it up, and a ...
Read more

The rona is still rising

A quick Google search for "coronavirus dashboard" brings up some not-so-great news. Taken nationally, figures are nearly half of what they were at the peak, and three or so times what they were this time last year. Some places, especially the ones that are harder hit than last year, are seeing smaller rises, or even a steady pace of new infection. That was with Delta, and no one knows what Mu is going to do. Coronavirus mutation rates are significantly higher than previously thought, and vaccines and natural immunity seem to lose their effectiveness with each new variant. This makes sense, given that antibodies can recognize one virus structure and may be less effective at locking on to others. Keep the analogy simple, work a jigsaw puzzle sometime and have a piece that looks like it should fit, but doesn't quite really fit. You can push it down and sort of make it work, but you know it's not really right. Viruses and antibodies work sort of the same way. An antibody ...
Read more

The trillion dollar platinum coin

 Life sometimes imitates art in the most pathetic and scary of ways. The treasury is considering minting a trillion dollar platinum coin to avoid a government default. Back in 1998, the Simpsons ran an episode where the government had printed a trillion dollar bill as part of the Marshall plan, but it was stolen by Montgomery Burns en route to Europe. I'm not sure which idea is dumber. The two main discussion points around minting the coin are being able to forestall a default by raising money that will tide things over until Congress raises the debt limit. The second point is that this can be done without adding to the national debt or causing inflation. Huh? The government borrows money to run everything, so essentially, issuing a coin for currency will just be borrowing more money to cover the cost of that. While it's technically true that it wouldn't contribute to inflation, it would certainly contribute to the debt, but since the country has been monetizing debt for a...
Read more