Hot enough for you this summer? Because it’s going to get hotter, and I’m not referring to our increasingly debased electoral rhetoric.
As a post to Science Matters emphasizes, climate change is not a prediction. It’s here. Even scientists who were previously skeptical (and there weren’t many) are now convinced that the earth is warming even more rapidly than previously expected, and that human activity is a large generator of that warming.
Let’s ignore every other issue dividing Americans–what to do about the economy, about Syria and Iran, about the various “wars”–on women, on the GLBT community, on drugs…you name it. In a very real sense, arguments over those issues are equivalent to arguments about how to arrange the deck chairs on the Titanic. If there is one issue of global life-and-death importance, it’s climate change.
And on that issue, the parties could not be further apart.
The science–and the scientific consensus–is overwhelming; we face a truly unprecedented global threat. The Democrats haven’t exactly covered themselves with glory, but they have acknowledged the threat and the urgency of addressing it. Most Republicans, on the other hand, continue to deny the science and reject the reality of climate change. (I suppose that shouldn’t surprise us; they also reject evolution.) Mitt Romney is now parroting the GOP’s standard climate change denial, and Paul Ryan, his running mate, is a climate-change-denying conspiracy theorist.
I’m not a believer in single-issue voting, but I’m not a big fan of committing slow suicide, either. If there was ever a single issue worth embracing, this is it.
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