At Common Dreams, Bill McKibben offers this staggering statistic:
The Chamber of Commerce spent more money on the 2010 elections than the Republican and Democratic National Committees combined, and 94% of those dollars went to climate-change deniers. That helps explain why the House voted last year to say that global warming isn’t real.
At Huffpo, Ted Kaufman begs us to take the issue of climate change serious, pointing readers to the websites of serious science organizations and warning us of the horrific consequences of doing nothing.
Virtually every reputable organization of scientists in the world has reached the same basic conclusion. Climate change is real and poses a threat to every living thing on the earth. To not take climate change seriously, you must somehow believe there is a gigantic international conspiracy involving the world's top scientists, all of whom have agreed to distort their data. Come on.
I highly respect Ted Kaufman for speaking up when we needed to hear him, both on this issue and with regard to banking reform. He often seemed to be the lone thoughtful voice among the clowns and chaos of Congress. He's no longer in Congress, but I do think he's spot on here. Unfortunately, it seems that the people (at least the people I know) have made the leap from climate change skepticism to climate change resignation. I remember wincing when I heard Al Gore's line at the end of Inconvenient Truth that we shouldn't make this leap--it seemed even then that our economic incentives are all in the wrong places and that is exactly what we would do. I fear that is what we are now doing. Here's what I'm sensing out there: "Yep. We're destroying the Earth. We're destroying it in a thousand ways, and climate change is but one of these ways. And we're not willing to do much of anything about it. We don't even like the low efficiency light bulbs, so please leave us alone about this issues of climate change."The UK Guardian offers this story and this sobering two-minute video demonstrating global warming:
A darling of many climate-change skeptics is a physicist who has done his own analysis and concluded:
The earth is indeed getting warmer. Global average land temperatures have risen 0.91 degrees Celsius over the past 50 years. This is "on the high end of the existing range of reconstructions." The rate of increase on land is accelerating. Warming for the entire 20th century clocks in at 0.73 degrees C per century. But over the most recent 40 years, the globe has warmed at a rate of 2.76 degrees C per century.
Barack Obama once promoted "Cap and Trade" as an alleged method for reducing carbon emissions, but has since backed off of that idea. Thank goodness, because cap and trade is a terrible approach for several major reasons that are well illustrated by this video, "The Story of Cap & Trade" by Annie Leonard. Now, if we can only get Barack Obama to quit using the term "clean coal" as if such a thing is economically feasible.