Tag: global warming
Danziger: Boiling Point

Danziger: Boiling Point

Jeff Danziger lives in New York City. He is represented by CWS Syndicate and the Washington Post Writers Group. He is the recipient of the Herblock Prize and the Thomas Nast (Landau) Prize. He served in the US Army in Vietnam and was awarded the Bronze Star and the Air Medal. He has published eleven books of cartoons and one novel. Visit him at DanzigerCartoons.com.

The War Against Warming: Why We Must Fight

The War Against Warming: Why We Must Fight

Even after Hitler invaded Czechoslovakia and Poland, a strong pacifist movement in Britain opposed a military buildup to confront Nazi Germany. It vilified Winston Churchill as a warmonger for pushing one.

“What is it that Britain and France are fighting for?” Churchill asked rhetorically in a March 1940 broadcast. “If we left off fighting you would soon find out.”

Five months later, bombs started dropping on London. Britain found itself alone and teetering on the edge of an invasion by Nazi Germany. And in these dark hours, when a militarily weak Britain suffered frightening losses on the battlefields, politicians who opposed preparing for war blamed Churchill for being a poor wartime leader.

Climate change is a very different kind of peril, but it, too, is menacing our planet with catastrophic consequences for both our natural environment and built civilization. The warnings have been coming fast and furiously for years as the powers in Washington lifted not a finger to deal with the danger. Worse, many denied it is real.

Now listen to Cathy Crain, mayor of Hamburg, Iowa, whose Missouri River town was inundated to the rooftops by apocalyptic flooding.

“I’m looking at global warming — I don’t need to see the graphs,” Crain said. “I’m living it and everybody else is living it.”

Americans are finding out why they must fight. They see the devastating fires, droughts, hurricanes and tornados. They watch towns and beautiful farmland in Iowa, Nebraska and Missouri disappear under the water.

And it’s just started. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration says 25 states could see moderate to major flooding through May. Some will surpass the infamous floods of 1993 and 2011.

Case in point is Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley. When the subject came around to climate change, the Republican pointed fingers at the all-purpose “radical environmentalists” for killing jobs. Now he blames them for allegedly forcing the Army Corps of Engineers — which oversees flood control efforts — to favor wildlife over farmers.

The corps serves several constituencies, but as its deputy commanding general for civil and emergency operations said in a recent statement, “The Corps’s No. 1 priority in its operations is life safety.”

Thing is, for over a century, the corps has been building, building, building levees, spillways and other infrastructure to control the waters. This system is crumbling under the pressure of climate-induced flooding. You could build levees seemingly halfway to heaven with more borrowed money, but in many cases, they won’t meet the growing challenge.

And even when levees — built or sometimes removed — succeed in preventing floods in one place, they can create problems elsewhere. After all, the water has to go someplace. When a levee was demolished in 2011 to save Cairo, Illinois, from a rampaging Mississippi River, some 100,000 acres, mostly farmland, was flooded.

In his previous job as Missouri attorney general, Hawley joined a suit against Barack Obama’s Clean Power Plan, designed to contain global warming. President Trump applauded.

With leadership like this, the war against climate change hasn’t even reached the end of the beginning. Surrender and blaming others is not a winning strategy.

Follow Froma Harrop on Twitter @FromaHarrop. She can be reached at fharrop@gmail.com.To find out more about Froma Harrop and read features by other Creators writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Web page at www.creators.com.

#EndorseThis: John Oliver’s Classic Climate Debate, Framed As If Science Matters

#EndorseThis: John Oliver’s Classic Climate Debate, Framed As If Science Matters

This moment may go down in history as the turning point of modern civilization, when Donald Trump doomed us by pulling the United States out of the Paris climate accord. Even if humanity somehow survives Trump’s dim-witted decision, the impact of his policies will damage the planet for decades to come.

So today we present a video that Trump ought to watch, if only to understand how stupid he sounds when he insists that the threat of climate change is a hoax.

Short enough for his truncated attention span, It is John Oliver’s classic climate debate –a “statistically representative” discussion, framed according to the actual scientific consensus about global warming, rather than the conventional idiocy dictating that both sides deserve equal weight. Co-starring with Oliver is Bill Nye, the “science guy” and perennial voice of reason.

 

Some Conservative Institutions Cannot Deny Climate Change

Some Conservative Institutions Cannot Deny Climate Change

MOBILE, ALABAMA — There has been no need to unpack the winter clothes this year because we haven’t had winter. My second-grader goes to school every morning wearing a cardigan, but she greets me in the afternoon in short sleeves.

Here on Alabama’s Gulf Coast, we’ve had an endless spring of balmy, sunny weeks that were punctuated by a couple of days of January frost. On Christmas Day, Mobile recorded a historic high temperature of 80 degrees, which broke the record of 79 degrees that was set the year before, according to the National Weather Service.

So it goes across planet Earth. Last year was the hottest year on record, beating the record set in 2015. And 2015 topped the record set in 2014, according to NASA. Scientists say that this is the first time that temperature records have been broken three years in a row.

Down here, the sunny days are pleasant enough, but they portend calamity. There is no greater threat facing humankind than global warming. For all the time spent worrying about jihadist terrorists and Mexican criminals, they don’t constitute an existential threat to humanity. Climate change does.

The scientific consensus is clear: Soaring temperatures, caused by human activity, have dire consequences. Among those are more frequent extreme weather events, including droughts, flooding, wildfires, and severe storms. The United States has already experienced flooding and droughts, from the Gulf Coast to California, that foretell things to come.

But poorer countries, as seems to be their fate, will fare even worse, even though the wealthier countries — with their automobiles, air conditioning, and jet planes — have done the most to warm the planet. Droughts will likely be more severe in countries such as Ethiopia; the Maldives and the Marshall Islands may be swamped by rising sea levels and cease to exist, scientists say.

Of course, President Donald Trump has famously said that global warming is a hoax perpetrated by the Chinese. But the real danger that Trump represents comes not from his unhinged declarations, but from the policies that will characterize his administration. He has announced his intention to overturn several Obama-era environmental regulations, including one that bans new coal mining leases on federal lands.

Worse still is his stewardship of the Environmental Protection Agency. Trump has named Scott Pruitt, a climate-change skeptic who wants to destroy the EPA, as its director. As Oklahoma’s attorney general, Pruitt was in league with fossil-fuel giants whose goal was to defy every conceivable government regulation so they could pillage the planet as they pleased, recently released emails show. That includes the billionaire Koch brothers, who have done much to bend politics to their laissez-faire liking.

Pruitt and his allies would have you believe that the science on climate change is still in doubt, that the clamor over climate change is just noise from a group of leftist malcontents. Really? Consider the consensus from two groups that are hardly known for their liberal leanings.

The first is the property and casualty insurance industry, which conducts research to try to limit its losses from property damage. Last year, the Center for Insurance Policy and Research cited a study that found that “extreme weather events (such as prolonged droughts, hurricanes, floods, and severe storms) led to $560 billion in insured losses from 1980 to 2015. Experts predict climate change will continue to intensify the frequency and severity of these types of weather-related events.”

The second group that defies characterization as a bunch of tree-hugging leftists is the Department of Defense, which has described climate change as a “threat multiplier.” According to the 2014 Quadrennial Defense Review, “The pressures caused by climate change will influence resource competition while placing additional burdens on economies, societies and governance institutions around the world.”

When poorer countries are devastated by climate change — when droughts are frequent and severe and water and food are scarce — people will leave, seeking refuge in wealthier countries. The tides of refugees will not be held back, no matter how many walls we build.

That’s no hoax.

Cynthia Tucker won the Pulitzer Prize for commentary in 2007. She can be reached at cynthia@cynthiatucker.com.

IMAGE: Greenpeace