Reality Vs. Blindness on Climate Change:
Here's a story that didn't get much play from late last week: Cracks developed in the walls of a pretty new subway station in lower Manhattan. Shitty construction, yes, always, welcome to the world of corrupt contracting and subcontracting and sub-subcontracting on the taxpayer's dime. But there's another reason that the CEO of Metropolitan Transit Authority says that leaks are visible at the South Ferry station, completed in 2009: "[W]hat's also happening is that the water table is rising."
Did you catch that? The guy in charge of the MTA states, as fact, that rising sea levels are responsible, in part, for the leaks in walls of the subway because, apparently, the original 2005 plans didn't take into account that New York Harbor would be a bit deeper in the coming years. Why do you think the water level has risen? Extra tourist urine? Cloverfield monster? Yeah, it's because of climate change. Because one of the most disastrous effects of climate change is rising sea levels, just like that bastard Al Gore told us so long ago. And here is a top official telling us that global warming is fucking with the infrastructure of New York City.
Then there's Washington, DC meteorologist Doug Kammerer, who, in the midst of the destructive storm blast this weekend, said, flatly, "If we did not have global warming, we wouldn’t see this." "This" is the intense heat, the sudden megastorms, the weather in general. Kammerer said, "I really believe that, I really think that this is because — maybe we would have seen 101, maybe we would have seen 102, but not 104."
Maybe you're like the Rude Pundit and you've got friends who are still without power in the DC area or in West Virginia or elsewhere. But you, like many of them, believe without a doubt that the earth is warming, and, holy shit, when are we gonna do something about it? And there's a good chance that most of your conservative friends believe it, including the members of Congress.
But the thing is that, no matter how much John Boehner's withered nutsack sticks to his upper thigh and no matter how much Mitch McConnell sweats into his giant ass crack, they are going to do exactly nothing. They have many masters to serve, in the oil and coal industries, among others, and they are going to stick their heads in the sand and pretend it ain't real, which, if you think about it, is pretty much the GOP way these days. Don't want to believe that health care reform is legit? Then fuck it. Pretend it doesn't exist.
Of course, then, it's left to the Executive Branch, with an assist from the courts, to do something when nothing is the only option on the table. Check this out from an ass-kicking of a decision at the DC U.S. Court of Appeals in favor of the EPA's authority to regulate greenhouse gases, a unanimous verdict against states and industry groups who tried to halt the EPA:
"EPA simply did here what it and other decision-makers often must do to make a science-based judgment: it sought out and reviewed existing scientific evidence to determine whether a particular finding was warranted. It makes no difference that much of the scientific evidence in large part consisted of 'syntheses' of individual studies and research. Even individual studies and research papers often synthesize past work in an area and then build upon it. This is how science works. EPA is not required to re-prove the existence of the atom every time it approaches a scientific question."
Like the CEO of the MTA, like Doug Kammerer, like you and many of your moist and red-faced friends, you know that science is science and one can run and hide, but eventually the skies will fall and the walls will collapse and no amount of one's denial will stop one from drowning.
