It’s going to get really rough

If you think I’m being a bit of a worry-wort here’s the latest Time magazine’s headline on the issue of climate change – Trump’s presidency could mean the end of a livable climate heading an article by Bryan Walsh. As Walsh points out it was incredible timing as the annual U.N. climate summit celebrated the Paris Agreement on November 7^th, only to be followed on the 9^th with the election of Donald Trump who, amongst the leaders of nearly two hundred nations (basically the whole world), will be the only one who doesn’t accept the undeniable truth of climate change.

CBS News ran a piece about the serious threat of climate change and showed a map of the USA with the states that are already, and will much more, suffering the most. They chose to color those states in red and for a moment I thought they were showing the same map that they’d showed in the early hours of Nov 9^th. Heh, folks in those Southern states and some mid-western ones who voted Trump in - I hope you’ll remember and take note when your homes and farms are flooded and the stronger and more frequent hurricanes and tornadoes roar over your homes. Not very bright; and it surely is a sad coincidence (not really) that many of these states also have the worst performing public schools in the nation.

Trump most probably couldn’t tell you what Carbon dioxide is or how it’s formed. And Vice-President elect Pence said the other day that he dislikes all science. Wonderful, don’t expect any antibiotics, which scientific research has labored to produce for you, if you get an infection Mike. But the folks who financed and pushed for a Trump victory – they know damned well what their up to. As Walsh points out in his Time magazine article, CO2 levels have gotten dramatically higher in just the last few years, so that they’re now much higher than they’ve ever been in the last 400,000 years! 

Then there’s an even more disturbing article in the current issue of the New York Review of Books written by two members of the Rockefeller family – David Kaiser and Lee Wasserman. They begin by saying that the Rockefeller Family Fund is in the process of divesting from ExxonMobil Corporation. This is because research by Columbia University School of Journalism has discovered that Exxon scientists have known for decades about the link between burning fossil fuels and climate change, and then after informing the company executives have agreed to come up with - if not downright lies, obfuscations. Kaiser and Wasserman report that currently the Attorney Generals of New York, California and Massachusetts are therefore investigating whether ExxonMobil is guilty of fraud by failing to disclose to its shareholders the business risks involved in major climate change which they are fully aware of. Of course, don’t expect any support from the incoming Attorney General.

And then if all this wasn’t enough in my readings, my latest copy of Scientific American arrived and it has an article on the accelerating thawing of the permafrost mostly in northern Canada and Alaska and northern Russia. The article by Prof. Ted Schuur of Northern Arizona University states that this “Northern Hemisphere’s permafrost zone contains an estimated 1.035 trillion metric tons of carbon in the top three meters of frozen soil, which could escape if the ground thaws, amplifying global warming significantly.”

Happy Thanksgiving folks.