Record Temperatures Meet Record Stupidity
Toby Barlow
07.17.2006
I'm once again completely blown away by the inability of the major media to connect the dots in even the most simplistic way.
This Associated Press article on the heat wave is full of all sorts of cutesy comments about the current record heat, "I could use a pool out here", "Oh, I love it balmy." etc, but there is not ONE mention of the fact that this current trend is - in fact - a clear sign of global warming.
This is how it has been for the last couple of decades, an endless drumbeat from the news at five chanting "record heat", "record temperatures", "record highs" while it's left to the "left" to point out that maybe this is part of some much larger event, one that threatens life everywhere on this planet.
The only consolation, and it is a small one, was that yesterday in the Burlington Airport I overheard a man on his cell phone saying "Yeah, I'm going down to New York... yeah it's hot...hey did you see that Al Gore movie?...Yeah, it's good." So maybe the message is getting out there. Then again, that was Vermont.
Meanwhile, we have George Bush for two more years and a rate of incumbency in the House and Senate making it hard to believe that any change is going to happen. And no matter what happens here, the Chinese are still building coal plants at a nice clipped pace and every species that doesn't have the blessing of central air (armadillos, crayfish, etc.) just keep heading north, you know, up to where the polar bears are dying. And the life that can't move, like the coral reefs, are slowly being cooked to death in the ocean's warming waters.
Once the heat gets high enough, melting the permafrost and releasing the enormous quantities of methane trapped below, our "record temperatures" will leap even higher. Then it's going to be real "balmy." Oh, yeah.
But there's not a single prominent world leader doing anything about it. Nero only had one fiddle; we've got a whole damn orchestra.
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