Today is Earth Day. Let’s pretend we care about the Earth.
So, global warming-that’s still going on. And if we don’t act quickly, millions of people could die preventable deaths and our grandchildren will judge our generation as the solipsistic frauds who Twittered as the waters rose.
Oh … Now I see why we don’t do this more often.
Before you rush to your computers to send me the latest “evidence” that the scientific community has spent the last couple decades lying to us all, I would suggest that you save yourself the time and look at these pictures. For those of you who are reading this on dead trees (HaHa! Irony), I just linked to a set of photos I took in fall 2008 in Napa, an ethnically Tibetan village in Yunnan province, China. These pictures show that half of the village, including most of its farmland, is underneath a lake fed by the seasonal “snowmelt” from the Himalayas. This did not start happening until the last decade. By the way, now that they are unable to grow enough crops to feed themselves, the villagers’ main source of income is to chop down the nearby forests.
Unfortunately for us all, climate change is real, and it is having and will continue to have real consequences when it comes to where people live and how they try and survive.
It’s not just me saying this, I’ve got backup from a group of leftist eco-radicals that go by the handle “The United States Department of Defense.” They’ve been looking into the matter, and it turns out that rendering the homelands of millions of people unlivable tends to create the conditions that start wars, especially when you take into account that many of the areas that will be hardest hit already suffer from extreme poverty. So, they recently classified climate change as a national security threat in their “Quadrennial Defense Review.”
To understand why, I feel it is only necessary to summarize the results of one of the hypotheticals the National Defense University considered. What would happen if large parts of Bangladesh–a country that is on average only 12 meters above sea level–became permanently flooded? According to The New York Times, they concluded it would result in, “hundreds of thousands of refugees streaming into neighboring India, touching off religious conflict, the spread of contagious diseases and vast damage to infrastructure.”
Just what India needs.
Some economists and politicians have argued that when accounting for increases in global GDP in the future, climate change’s cost in “present value” does not warrant a large, immediate investment. I disagree with many parts of their analysis, but what is perhaps most jarring about their work is that their models focus on the damage the rising waters will cause, but not what will result from humanity’s response to its new, harsher environment. They ignore that humanity’s greatest problem has been the damage that humans do to each other. Particularly when they’re starving, frightened and have guns.
Weinberg senior Michael Gsovski can be reached at [email protected].
