I actually said the headline of this post out loud when I read this Huffington Post article…
Sea levels across the Northeast coast of the United States rose nearly 3.9 inches between 2009 and 2010, according to a new study from researchers at the University of Arizona and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The waters near Portland, Maine, saw an even greater rise — 5 inches — over the two-year period.
Source: Huffington Post
Climate change is probably the most serious problem facing humanity today and it makes our petty squabbles insignificant. I can’t emphasize this enough, it’s a civilization changing event and we’re starting to feel the effects. Some deniers reason that because the winter has been cold that we don’t have a problem but you can’t look at yearly temperatures or temperatures of isolated area, you need to look at the global average and over much longer periods.
It might be cold in most of North America but the global average temperature in 2014 was warmer than average!
It doesn’t help that the US (and Canada) have ridiculous politicians like Senator (R) James Inhofe (who is the freaking chair of the Senate Environmental committee) who are in the pockets of big oil and employing the stall & delay tactics used by the smoking industry in saying the science is not settled, uh yes it is.
“We keep hearing that 2014 has been the warmest year on record,” Inhofe said. “So I ask the chair,” — referring to Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-LA) — “Do you know what this is? It’s a snowball, from just outside here. So it’s very, very cold out… very unseasonable.” He then lobbed said snowball to a page and lapsed into deep silence, a smile across his face.
Source: VOX
Of course what the hell does Senator Inhofe care, he’ll be long dead when we need to deal with the more dramatic effects of climate change…
Finally I tell people who don’t believe in climate change, ok let’s give them the benefit of the doubt that it’s fake… It still makes sense to move off fossil fuels, I mean it’s a freaking limited resource while renewables are free which is also a good economic reason. Also what’s wrong with cleaning up after ourselves, why should we leave a dirtier world to the next generation than the one we inherited?
Ugh, why the media continues to give equal time to climate change deniers drives me nuts. I mean we don’t give people who believe in a flat Earth equal time when NASA talks about the planet.
