Monday, March 10, 2014

Speak the Speech, I Pray You

….Trippingly off the tongue:

More than two dozen Democratic senators will take to the Senate floor on Monday for an all-night session of speeches on climate change.

The marathon session will get underway after the last vote on Monday night and could last until 9am on Tuesday, Senate staff said.

The high visibility all-nighter was organised by a new initiative, the Climate Action Task Force, which is trying to galvanise support for Barack Obama's climate change agenda.

The Senators said they would be tweeting throughout the night, using the hashtag #Up4Climate.

Well, at least someone is talking about it, even if it’s only talk and only overnight.

It’s easy to forget global warming in the face of one of the coldest, harshest winters in recent memory, one where we learned a new term: “polar vortex”.

But the planet did not. In fact, January, 2014 was the fourth warmest January in world history. This is not good news if you’re a fan of living.

In fact, it’s been 30 years since the planet as a whole had a month that was cooler than normal, and mind you, “normal” is a moving average, so we’re exceeding our already rising averages.

That Democrats are taking stage tonight to endlessly remind us that we are not America, the planet, but America, a country on Earth, is really pretty important.

Ineffectual, but important.

(A personal note: I suspect this summer is going to be brutal in the US. I don’t have any evidence to really base this upon, except that nature has a way of rebounding fiercely, and winter was pretty cold here.)

I wish I knew what it would take for climate change morons deniers to come around. Bill Maher said it best a few weeks ago: If we’re prepared to repel even a one percent success rate of terrorism, then certainly deniers can admit there’s a one percent chance that the 99.99% of reputable scientists who agree that global warming is real and manmade are right, and therefore, we should take some steps to secure our future and our children’s future.

But I doubt those morons think that deeply. Maybe when the water is over their heads, they’ll finally give it a thought.