It would be nice if the climate change issue were just politics, but unfortunately that doesn’t seem to be the case. I don’t think it’s a hoax that the Colorado River is drying up – there are too many people who could tell us so if it were. Same with those floods in India and Pakistan last year, and the massive wildfires in Australia, and the shrinking ice in Greenland and Antarctica, and other little blips like that.
Ron DeSantis has been accused of a “catastrophic” approach to the climate crisis after he launched his campaign for US president by saying he rejects the “politicization of the weather” and questioning whether hurricanes hitting his home state of Florida have been worsened by climate change.
DeSantis, the Republican Florida governor who announced his bid for the White House via a glitch-heavy Twitter stream on Wednesday, has previously dismissed concerns about global heating as “leftwing stuff” and he expanded upon this theme during a Fox News interview following his campaign launch.
How comforting that would be if true, but…
While governor, DeSantis has adopted bills banning Florida’s cities from adopting 100% clean energy goals and barred the state’s pension fund from making investment decisions that consider the climate crisis due to what he called a corporate attempt to “impose an ideological agenda on the American people”. He has also attacked the US military for being “woke” for warning about the national security risks posed by climate impacts.
“The cost of taking his anti-climate record to the national stage as president would be catastrophic,” said Pete Maysmith, senior vice-president of campaigns for the League of Conservation Voters. “DeSantis has already made clear he would unleash his war on climate science, clean energy jobs, and strong pollution safeguards against clean air and clean water.”
If only we could vote climate change out.
Comments
6 responses to “That there leftwing stuff”
The best source of data on Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) that I know of is at the site below run by the Sea Level Research Group of the University of Colorado, whose members use satellite altimetry, the reference point of which is the geographic centre of the Earth. They cite an average rise-rate of 3.4 +/- 0.4 mm/year. That in turn I MHO can be safely attributed to the burning of fossil carbon since the start of the Industrial Revolution circa 1750 AD. It equates to 3.4 metres per 1,000 years: enough to put a lot of the buildings of the Graeco-Roman world definitely under the briny if it had been going on since Classical times. But under the briny is where a fair number of coastal cities, towns, villages and prime agricultural land etc are headed by a few generations from now. I’d say real-estate opportunities galore, for the smart investor..
http://sealevel.colorado.edu/
C’mon, whaddo a buncha eggheads in COLORADO ffs know about oceans?
Seriously though Omar, either I remember you posting this same comment awhile before, or my mind is even more scrambled than I thought. Say it ain’t so! About my mind I mean.
So often we are told to “follow the money”. So let’s follow the money on climate change and we find that one of the biggest believers is the insurance companies, suffering huge claims and resulting in higher premiums or refusal to write policies in some areas.
Where I live we have just been through the biggest flood in 70 years and some of my neighbours have seen flood insurance refused at renewal or premiums rising from 100s to tens of thousands of dollars.
Very few insurance companies are run by “Lefties”, they are run by profit hungry capitalists who know on which side their greenbacks are buttered.
Bruce: @#2: I used to comment at a very right-wing, science-denying coal-shillery and under my birth-name and no nom-de-blog until I was unceremoniously chucked out, for repeatedly making that point, and banned forever and ever, amen. Also at Guardian Australia until financial constraints caused them to cease asking for reader comments on their articles. So, don’t worry about your mind. If you must worry, make it about the consequences of AGW as set out in ‘Storms of My Grandchildren’ by the leading climatologist Michael Mann, as at https://www.alibris.com/search/books/isbn/9781608195022 .
AP via Daily Kos: Drought, water overuse prompt Arizona to limit construction in some fast-growing parts of Phoenix
Strikes as “much too little, far too late”, but it’s something.
It’s something in the way deciding to leave a burning house is something. No wait, in the way setting a house on fire from the inside and then deciding to leave when the roof falls in is something. See also: Miami.