| Not great news for farmers and anyone growing food. I have just finished rereading Mark Lynas book, "Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet". A book which, alas, won't be read by the likes of global warming denier Senator Inhofe (R-OK), who has amply demonstrated his ferocious loyalty to big oil and the energy cartel to the detriment of logic. His pockets are full of graft.
Let me explain what's in store for us. First of all we now know for sure, as does German Chancellor Merkel who tried to talk some sense to the other leaders, that the world will start to unravel once we heat up another two degrees (though some deniers seem to think that we're entering a mini ice age!) Simply, as Mark Lynas explains, the Amazon rain forest has no resistance to fire because it is constantly humid. When the planet heats up by another three degrees the humidity dries out, and the Amazon, being the lungs of the Earth, burns to a cinder. This will cause the Siberian peat-bogs to thaw and release its massive amounts of methane into the atmosphere. We are now getting closer to five degrees. Once we get to six degrees we have reached the end game. Adios!
A variety of headlines from the USA tells me that he's not wrong: Scorched USA suffers worst drought since Great Depression....Drought, a fixture in much of the West for nearly a decade, now covers more than one-third of the continental USA. And it's spreading.... |
| Nevada has recorded its driest year since 1924...shipping on Lake Superior in Minnesota has been reduced amid concerns that boats will run aground...drought in Georgia is threatening 80% of the peach crop...a third dry season in a row is hitting crops hard in Tennessee...the water level in Lake Okeechobee, Florida, is so low that 12,000 acres caught fire last year...every county of Arizona is suffering from extreme drought...Alabama is going through its worst drought in 50 years, debilitating its cotton farms...parts of California have received only 3 inches of rain in the last year. Global warming is relentless.
Lynas explains the cause of the great Dust Bowl disaster: The Dust Bowl was the result of catastrophic dust storms causing major ecological and agricultural damage to American prairies in the 30's The fertile soil of the Great Plains had been exposed by removal of grass during ploughing over decades of ill-conceived farming techniques.
It ain't pretty.
And what, might we ask, did GWB do to alleviate our good earth's ills for the past seven and a half years? Nothing. Nada. Ziltch. That's what you get from a president whose political life has been much in the service of the companies who profit from pumping out warming gases, and want to continue drilling, at all cost.
I remember reading a few years ago an article on GWB's views on global warming. He had invited the celebrated Hollywood hack, Michael Crichton, to the White House to laud him to the heavens about his book, "State of Fear" (I haven't read it, don't go for that sort of tripe) whose main story purports to tell the real view on global warming by depicting a bunch of environmentalist groups as desperate for the climate change to take place (why, we'll never know). So they blast a huge chunk of the Antartic to cause a major tsunami to hit the West Coast of the United States on the day of an academic conference...on, guess what, global warming so that they can get funding (possibly to channel some of that moolah to the repukes (my guess).
Will the next president of the most powerful nation on Earth do something to preserve it? I certainly hope so. |
