By Doug Draper
“What my country is going through as a result of this extreme climate event is madness, said the Philippines’ climate change commissioner Yeb Sano during an emotional plea for action at a United Nations conference in Poland this November 11th.
The climate change champion from the Philippines, Yeb Sano, pleading for global action.
“We can fix this,” Sano added “We can stop this madness. Right now, right here.”
I watched this address from Yeb Sano on some U.S. cable channels after viewing the latest news on CNN and CBC, showing the utterly horrific devastation in the communities across the Philippine Islands following a typhoon that goes down the severest wind storm of its kind on record – making Hurricanes Katrina and Sandy almost seem like pesky gusts of wind by comparison.
But will we fix it? We can send all of the aid possible to the surviving people in those Philippine communities. And according to reports, Canadians and Americans are already contributing generously to emergency relief, and that is good. We have to. But in the long run, all we are doing is tending to a terrible wound, a symptom, and still not facing our responsibility as citizens of this world to address the disease itself.
That disease is climate change and the contribution literally thousands of eminent scientists and climatologists around the world now believe we humans are making to it through our continued emissions of oil, coal and other carbon based fuels. Just a few months ago, the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change produced a seminal report, one that produced research that more strongly than ever before showed that human-made climate change is real and the costs to us now and for future generations are going to be so catastrophic that we as a global community will no longer be able to cope with them.
But let’s just go back to the words of Mr. Sano
How much longer are we going to go on tolerating the denials of fundamentalist nuts like Canada’s current prime minister, Stephen Harper, who can’t wait to destroy more of our boreal forests to dig out more of that tarry goo in the so-called oil-sands, and put up with the Tea Party wackos in America who seem to be running policy in that country now.
Let me ask you something. Do you have any children or grand-children? Do you care, and I am sure you do, about their future? Then answer the appeal of Mr. Sano, Greenpeace (that now has 30 of its own in Russia for protesting oil drilling in the Arctic), and others. And that means shedding the Sarah Palin/Tea Party/oil-soaked Koch brothers propaganda that some of our Niagara area neighbours have adopted that wind and solar power is some sort of socialist or commie plot, or something as wacko as the Dr. Strangelove fluoride in their drinking water thing, that is going to somehow fig up or ravage their lives.
We might be better off coming to terms with how this climate change thing might fig up our lives for ourelves and for our children and others we might care about after we expire.
Indeed, we all might be better off to go our places of worship or any other place we choose to go to contemplate the more serious matters of life and make a resolution to work together as citizens of this world to put an end to this madness.
(Niagara At Large invites you to share your views on this post. A reminder that we only post comments by individuals who share their first and last name with them.)
Niagara At Large 
Here we go again. Thousands of people killed by a Typhoon. And it is quite regrettable.
Too many people are crammed into coastal areas – where was the planning commission when these coastal communities were allowing to sprawl? New Orleans? Atlantis? T’was thus since the days of Noah. And on a cosmic scale superstorms were, are and will be the order of the day. The most recent serious superstorms, not covered in oprobium & rhetoric occurred at the beginning of each ice age. And Aunt Mildred driving a minivan had nothing to do with it.
How about reading history, understanding the difference between coast lands and higher ground?
But I guess that’s too boring, fact laden, and takes more than 140 characters. History just started last year with “Occupy Wallstreet”, didn’t ya know. And in our low knowledge culture, scientific facts are the poor cousin of reality shows, tweeting and twerking. Read a book? Are you mad?
The fact is that the earth convulses and changes for cosmic reasons, from solar events thru gamma bursts and polar shifts, not to mention asteroids and volcanoes that have remade the face of this planet umpteen times with mass extinctions in the 6 or 8 Billion years it’s been around. I am yet to be convinced that the dinosaurs drove cars and had air conditioning.
Human existence is a fluke, a blip, a joke by the gods. Mother nature has no sense of humour. She is a remorseless harridan and doesn’t even know we are here. The greatest conceit of mankind is that we have the ability to change anything other than on a microscopic level. We are but kids splashing about in a mud puddle.
Although Suzuki believes that the earth would do just fine if not for pesky humans mucking things up, a good parallel would be “there is no noise if there’s no one around to hear it”.
And as for the CO2 canard, the greatest greenhouse gas by many thousand-fold factor is water vapour, not manmade, but made by you guessed it, mother nature.
So what should we conclude? Simple – Mother nature is a serial killer.
LikeLike