No More Time For Climate Change Deniers

A Comment from Niagara At Large publisher Doug Draper 

A record downpour of rain in the City of Toronto this July 8 – a month’s worth in two hours and all but incapacitating an economic engine of Canada one of the largest metropolitan areas in North America with gushing flood waters for a critical number of hours.

Late this June, there was the devastating flooding in the Calgary, Alberta area that caused billions of dollar’s worth of property damage – not to mention incalculable losses of irreplaceable personal affects. All of this following a spring that saw an unprecedented number of what meteorologists call “severe weather events” – flooding, the fiercest bran of tornadoes, golf-ball size hail storms, extreme heat, including 70 and 80 degree F. temperatures in Alaska, of all places, and on and on – across this continent.

Of course, there was the trillion-dollar travesty of Hurricane Sandy last fall and two years ago this April, Niagara experienced near hurricane-force winds that felled thousands of trees, did hundreds of millions of dollars worth of property damage and killed two people.

This is the kind of weather on steroids, if you will, that climatologists and other scientists around the world have been warning about now for decades. It also continues to be something that others, including politicians and scientists in the pockets of the petrochemical industry, and Canada’s prime minister, Stephen Harper and others of his anti-science, evangelical Christian ilk (and here I am talking about knuckle draggers who think Fred Flintstone and dinosaurs were wandering around an earth created by some invisible man in the sky some 6,000 years ago), continue to push and laugh off as some kind of a communist plot perpetrated by what they consider to be arch enemies like Al Gore and David Suzuki.

I’ve been posting comments, mainly from disgruntled older white men for the past two years on this site, sending comments joking about climate change or global warming as if it was a third grade, schoolyard joke. Some of these commenters sent the odd rare photo of snow falling in Washington, D.C in early fall with a caption like; ‘Whatever happened to global warning?’ or other such nonsense, as if to suggest that anyone who believes we are entering a world of more frequent damaging and often catastrophic weather assaults is some kind of tree-hugging socialist clown.

Canada’s prime minister and most evangelical Christian leader Stephen Harper’s most ardent climate change denier, Joe Oliver of Toronto (of all places), championing his petro-chemical corporate friends and the tar sands.

Now I am stressing this to all of you climate change deniers out there. I believe that many of the rest of us have no further time for you backward thinkers and cockroaches for 19^th and 20^th century petrochemical industry.  If you are in your teens or 20s or you are a parent or grandparent of someone in their twenties or younger, your posts to this site will be taken about as seriously as one by any idiot who still wants to argue that smoking cigarettes has nothing to do with lung cancer.

Interesting thing is that there was a probing public television piece broadcast on U.S. and Canadian networks some five or more years ago on climate change deniers that showed that a number of the same “scientists” now shilling for the petro-chemical industry to say that there is still no proof human activities around heavy energy use and carbon emissions have anything to do with altering the climate of the planet, worked for major American tobacco companies three or so decades ago,  making the argument there that there is still no proof smoking has anything to do with cancer.

A year ago, during a discussion I had with Ontario’s Environmental Commissioner Gord Miller following the release of a report he released on the high costs of climate change, he noted that it seems to be a strategy on the part of some elements of the scientific, petro-chemical and political communities to keep the whole discussion down to a level where there is no reason to believe that human activities have anything to do with climate change. As long as they can keep the conversation there (as the tobacco industry did for decades on the link with cancer and respiratory and health disease), then we can’t even begin to put together action plans to address this – what many of the more enlightened thinkers of our time – call one of the greatest challenges facing humans on this planet in this century. 

U.S. President Barack Obama, in a keynote speech he delivered on climate change this June, said there should be no doubt our worldly activities around excessive, oil-carbon related energy use play a role in changes to the planet that are contributing in increasingly costly, catastrophic, weather-related destruction. No more time should be spent negotiating or dithering around with what Obama called ‘the flat earth society.”

“As a president, and as a father and as an American,” said Obama, “I’m here to say we need to act. I refuse to condemn your generation and future generations to a planet that’s beyond fixing.” 

To me that speech is one of the most important ones delivered for our present and future by any leader on this continent since Franklin D. Roosevelt said ‘we have nothing to fear but fear itself’ at the head of the 1930s Great Depression and Abraham Lincoln delivered the Gettysburg Address 150 years ago this coming fall.

What outrages me so much about the mainstream media in North America through this whole climate change issue is this bullshit idea that it is doing “balanced reporting” by having one scientist who believes climate change is a real, at least partially human-made deal, and one scientists who says it isn’t a real deal as talking heads on one of their shows. The truth is that those scientists who still think any connection between our activities and what we are doing to the earth around this issue are now in the vast minority, and if you do a search on their names and credentials, you can trace them back to petro-chemical lobbies.

So once again, from here on in Niagara At Large will allow for the views of climate change deniers but will be more apt to treat them with the same seriousness one would treat someone who still thinks the earth is flat or that smoking has little or nothing to do with lung cancer.

While I was on Cape Cod this past spring, visiting one of my favourite little alternative stores called ‘The Earth House’, I picked up a bumper sticker that reads; “The climate is changing faster than we are.”

Put down bumper sticker slogans as much as you want, but there is something in that one to think about.

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