Climate Change May End Civilization But The GOP Has Decided They Don't Care

VOX posted a disturbing video history of how the climate change consensus devolved into a partisan football game pitting the stupid people who distrust science against the rational people who trust science.

There was scientific consensus early on, then there was political consensus. Then people who disliked the consensus decided to sabotage it and destroy it. Why? For reasons of profit.

But the main visible reason that consensus seems to have broken down is because Americans elected a black man president. Republicans didn’t like having a black president and decided that everything he proposed needed to be blocked.

Of course it’s more complicated than that. Fossil fuel billionaires poured billions into the PR campaign to derail the rational response to the climate change threat. Their profits drove the whole propaganda machine. But the unifying principle behind the opposition and its absolute team unity was racism.

FoxNews enforced this opposition with dangerously misleading and prejudicial reporting and the Republican Party turned the future of civilization into a team sport. They decided they were on the team that didn’t believe the scientists. A Republican senator said on the floor of the Senate that climate change was a hoax because he had a snowball in his hand.

We know what the problem is. We know which companies are causing the problem. (You'll find a list here at Science Magazine.) We know our behavior is making the problem worse and we have the ability to choose. But the most powerful media force available to Americans, the most watched news network, FoxNews, is dead set against a rational response. Why? Because they are the network of the Republican Party and the Democratic Party is dedicated to the rational scientific response, so they are opposed to it. It’s a binary response. Whatever the other side is proposing, they’re against it.

For eight years this obstruction remained unified because the leader of the Democrats was black. They hated being told by a black man that something needed to be done. Following the leadership of a black man was against 500 years of tradition.

The new obstruction that will begin in 2017 will dictate that all Republicans must oppose everything President Hillary Clinton proposes because they dislike having a woman president. This opposition will be built on thousands of years of male dominant tradition.

Deep racism and sexism and the sacred profits of oil and coal companies have energized half of America into an irrational mob. They refuse to believe anything except what they are told by their masters. This has turned a danger into an existential threat to civilization.

This seems attractive to some on the right who believe if they screw up the world badly enough Jesus will come.

What people need to understand is simple enough. Civilization is built upon a predictable and reliable climate––reliable rainfall and reliable growing seasons. Climate change will end that. It took thousands of years of reliable rain and growing seasons to lay down the soil that grows the crops we live on. We built our infrastructure around these reliable growing regions. People need to understand what will happen when our farming infrastructure and our fertile soil is located where crops will no longer grow. When the oceans rise we will have difficulty shipping food because our port infrastructure will be flooded.

A recent president who was faced with his failure said he didn’t mind how history judged him because he’d be dead. This appears to be the reasoning of the wealthy and stupid forces organized to oppose responsible action to slow and halt climate change. By the time the world knows the Koch Brothers helped doom our civilization they will be dead.

At some point people with enormous wealth stopped behaving responsibly as people, as citizens, and began playing wealth as a game in which nothing mattered but the score they could rack up before they died, at which point the game was over.

The Climate Change Denial Business

The businesses who profited from the cancer delivery system known as cigarettes knew for decades how lethal they were, but they engaged in a long, deliberate and very successful coverup, bribing and intimidating scientists and lying to the news media and in sworn testimony. That was their business model.

We are seeing it again today, not with a lethal product line but with the careful and well-funded denial of what scientists have been warning us about for more than a decade: that our climate is warming because of fossil fuel use. And because civilization itself depends on existing climate patterns, rainfall patterns and temperature ranges this denial is endangering the survival of human life as we know it. We and our children are being put at grave risk to allow the fossil fuel giants to squeeze huge profits from peak oil. They don’t care what history might say about them because, as George W. Bush said “by the time that happens we’ll be dead.”

There's a new film out about the Denial Business. It's called MERCHANTS OF DOUBT. Big Oil is paying to suppress it.

Here are the main perpetrators in the climate change denial business, as reported by a Pulitzer Prize winning climate news service.

In The Guardian today: the Kochs refuse to testify about their climate change denial apparatus. Are the powerful allowed to plead the Fifth on the extinction of the human species?

THE TRIUMPH OF STUPIDITY ON CLIMATE CHANGE

Civilization, meaning everything in history that comes after we learned to farm, in fact all of history, is founded upon reliable climate, reliable rain and growing seasons. Climate change caused by the greed of fossil fuel billionaires fucks all of that.

Some places will be warmer, some colder, some will have longer growing seasons, some shorter, most will fluctuate meaning farmers will have to guess and hope even more than they do now (imagine the crop insurability problem then).

The changes will be dramatic. Some places will be too dry to support life. Some will be washed away in huge floods or flattened by huge storms. Things like this that happened in the Bible were interpreted as God’s punishment for wrongdoing––our wrongdoing this time is stupidly placing ourselves in the political grip of fossil fuel billionaires.

Think we can solve these problems by shipping grain from one lucky continent to another? Picture all of our functioning and extremely expensive port facilities under water and no longer functional.

Weird how the big insurers haven’t cottoned to this huge risk overhang. I think it’s because most big insurers think of themselves as investment companies investing the premiums they collect rather than insurers of risk, and right now at peak oil their biggest investments are with the oil companies. Colossally stupid. Stupid on top of stupid, which should help disprove the free market capitalist’s religion that says money is smarter than any of us. Money is mostly just greedy.

The greed of the top 1% may doom all of civilization, murdering millions. We should mind.

There is a local weatherman where I live who hosts “documentaries” that explain why Climate Change and Global Warming are stupid hoaxes. He says it’s hard enough to predict weather two weeks out, so it has to be impossible to predict what will happen in two decades. This sounds persuasive if you don’t think about it. Children are unpredictable too. We can’t predict what they’ll do tomorrow, but we have a pretty good idea what they’ll be up to over time, and we can be pretty sure in twenty years they’ll be twenty years older, with average luck. With average luck they'll live lives like ours, with better than average luck, better lives. Throw that average luck out and what happens?

Climate stability gives us average luck that we can build on. Climate instability takes that away: no predictability, no reliable averages to plan our complex civilization around. Climate scientists are warning us about the risks of enormous changes in our children's lifetimes. What changes exactly? It's hard to say, and that is the danger. Unreliable climate destroys civilizations and has ground many into dust over the centuries. Usually it happens slowly. Previously the climate changed slowly. Not this time.

The well paid attractive telegenic criminals who are distracting us from this enormous danger are being paid to distract us and dissuade us. 97% of all climate scientists agree, but we are being persuaded by smiling weathermen and ignorant politicians to ignore science.

These shills are being paid to help shore up a dirty 19th century industry that threatens us all. They are being paid to help us confuse Weather and Climate. Weather is if it’s raining outside. Weather is a discussion about whether to carry an umbrella tomorrow. It’s not deep stuff. Climate change is as deep as life and death for our nation, the happiness or misery of our descendants' lives, the arc of history itself.

Climate is the reason we have a prosperous nation. We are lucky to have a good, reliable, moderate and predictable climate. Climate Change is why there are dead civilizations buried under the sands of North Africa. Usually climate changes slowly. We are changing it radically and quickly and lethally unless we decide to stop changing it by changing the way we fuel our lives.