Monday, June 29, 2009

Thoughts on a baby shower and treason

Some very fine people invited me to a baby shower last weekend, for someone who will almost certainly be a very fine baby.

She was showered with adorable outfits, from friends and relatives alike - without a doubt, she's shaping up to be one of the most charmingly dressed young - very young - women in Nevada County.

The assemblage was thinking of her first year; but what about her future as a child, a teenager, an adult? If we choose to continue dithering about global climate destabilization, we choose to seriously endanger her world, and that of her classmates. Please, for her sake, read Krugman's new column Betraying the Planet:
The fact is that the planet is changing faster than even pessimists expected: ice caps are shrinking, arid zones spreading, at a terrifying rate. And according to a number of recent studies, catastrophe — a rise in temperature so large as to be almost unthinkable — can no longer be considered a mere possibility. It is, instead, the most likely outcome if we continue along our present course.

Thus researchers at M.I.T., who were previously predicting a temperature rise of a little more than 4 degrees (F) by the end of this century, are now predicting a rise of more than 9 degrees. Why? Global greenhouse gas emissions are rising faster than expected; some mitigating factors, like absorption of carbon dioxide by the oceans, are turning out to be weaker than hoped; and there’s growing evidence that climate change is self-reinforcing — that, for example, rising temperatures will cause some arctic tundra to defrost, releasing even more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.
...[W]e’re facing a clear and present danger to our way of life, perhaps even to civilization itself. How can anyone justify failing to act?
...
Yet the deniers are choosing, willfully, to ignore that threat, placing future generations of Americans in grave danger, simply because it’s in their political interest to pretend that there’s nothing to worry about. If that’s not betrayal, I don’t know what is.

This baby girl deserves better.


(Tom McClintock, she's your constituent)
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1 comment:

  1. Don Pelton6/30/2009 11:42 PM

    Thanks for the pointer to the excellent Krugman column. It's as if he caught fire with that one.

    ReplyDelete

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