
Greetings and salutations from the sand, sun and surf of Cape Cod, Martha’s Vineyard and the sunny island of Nantucket! Great to be with you on this Saturday morning, a gorgeous day on Cape, as I look out above at clean, white fair weather clouds mixed in with the cool air of autumn, even though the leaves on Cape do not start changing for at least a few more weeks, later than say, Vermont. Last night on the venerable HBO series, “Real Time, with Bill Maher”, Bill had, as his guest, one of my heroes, Mr. Keith Olbermann, who, along with Bill at the end of Bill’s segment, “New Rules”, confronted the typical republican, an actual audience member from Irvine, California, voter, who sat in a clear plastic bubble on stage, LIVE, with elevator music being pumped in as Keith and Bill attempted to explain to the man, the reason the economy is in the shitter is due, PRIMARILY, to the Bush tax cuts of 2001 and 2003, where, along with the two unpaid for wars, tab coming in at around 4.1 trillion, thus far, and the big pharma sweetheart deal, coming it at say another 1.2 trillion, we don’t have enough REVENUE to pay for social programs designed to help out THE LEAST OF US (least being measured in the amount of money you have or don’t have). Couple that with the boy in the bubble not being able to hear the FACTS about climate change, being man made and all, you have the greatest metaphor, a visual one at that, I have ever seen in regard to the Ostrich literally sticking it’s collective head in the sands of our ‘time’. Well done sir and thank you Bill for bringing the Dean of Journalism to a show that certainly does not need my endorsement. As a follow up to yesterday’s ‘blog’, the study of the earth’s radical departure from normal weather patterns, the radical shift continues on to present day, as we here at seacapecod.net wish to throw out some more FACTS and key points that may propel someone in this nation to actually WATCH and DIGEST Mr. Al Gore’s, the founder of CURRENT TV, “climaterealityproject.org” (please Google to watch clips); that is the new flagship beacon on climate and the crisis therein, in this day and age. There is no doubt, whatsoever, that this ‘fancy book lernen” (credit new cliche and misspellings to that mama Grizzly we all know and love), ya know, that ’science stuff’, is as true as is the fact that the sky above you, when clear, is actually BLUE, and we, as a nation, and indeed world at large, can no longer afford to just sit back and let a few bad actors destroy what creative intelligence gifted ALL of US–I’m lookin’ at you KOCH INDUSTRIES, and your brethren in the oil and coal ‘business’, who are hell bent on keeping the status quo of PROFIT OVER PEOPLE alive and well as it continues to ride rough shod over the citizens of the world, polluting our land, sea and air as they rake in HUGE profits, year in and year out, ever protected from the REAL WORLD via their investment in our nation’s political system, with a number of bought puppets in Washington D.C. that they carry around in their pocket like so many nickles and dimes. These godless industries continue to this day to destroy entire eco-systems, just more subtly, or brazenly, as they did recently in the Gulf of Mexico, where the 500 million barrels of oil that were spilled, laced with the banned dispersant Corexit 3500, now sit at the bottom of the oceans’ floor, out of site out of mind am I right?, killing the lowest forms of life that act as the foundation, if you will, or the first building block of our food chain, for our very life itself… What makes this ever more infuriating are the LIES these monsters tell the public, poisoning sound science with doubt as to the validity of this uncontested Truism that is not only empirical in nature, regarding the FACT that carbon dioxide is exponentially causing the earth’s temperature to rise, but moreover, may actually be, the earth that is, getting colder, again I say unto you my dear friends on the right–what planet are you from anyhow? As we all know, to one degree or another, the earth’s weather patterns are getting more unpredictable by the day, all due to the warming of the earth’s atmosphere, due to man made activity which someone is cashing in on. With these changes come pain, with stronger and stronger storms reeking havoc all over the globe, horrible heat waves, rising sea levels as the melting of the earth’s permanent ice features slowly slip away into oblivion, and severe droughts that spark wild fires that destroy ever more communities and lives, not to mention FAMINES, such as in the case of Somalia, where 12.5 million people are literally in danger of dying of thirst and lack of food, something that could very well happen in this country with say a Rick, “climate change is not based in fact”, Perry in the office of the Executive. God Forbid. The corporations responsible like to keep people wanting more, much like a crack dealer, and keep people deaf, dumb and blind, for the most part, ever placing doubt before proven scientific FACT, and will continue, if someone does not stop them, to use, as Al puts it, our atmosphere as ‘an open sewer’, marching on in a ‘capitalism’ game only they are playing, ignoring scientific FACT regarding the climate, going on as if everything is just peachy, unabated, uncontested, unapologetic, as they make a radical departure from a morality that this country, last time I checked, was based upon. The time to ACT is NOW, for the world will suffer greatly if the tide is not turned towards conservation and common sense for REAL this time–let us ACT on behalf, as the republicans love to say, ‘of our children and our grandchildren.’ So, without any further adieu, I present to you Mr. Al Gore and a few quotes from this amazing documentary, an update, if you will, from the 2006 film entitled, An Inconvenient Truth. AND ACTION! “Here, in the United States of America, this year, the Mississippi River had a record ‘flood flow rate’, it’s peaks at historical all time highs, in my home state of Tennessee, we saw some of those impacts. In North Dakota, the Surrey River (around Minot), saw the largest flood in the HISTORY of that state. In my home town of Nashville, a year ago May, thousands (this is the Opryland Hotel, see video!), where thousands of my neighbors lost their homes and businesses, with no flood insurance, because the areas that had been affected, had never, ever been flooded, which was described by the Army Core of Engineers as a once in a thousand year rain fall. Just a few miles from my house, on Interstate 24, this is a temporary classroom, floating down the interstate (see video!), something you don’t see every day. In other parts of the United States, just 2 weeks ago today, a hurricane that eventually turned into a tropical storm, went up the eastern seaboard and through the northeast, causing an estimated 12 billion dollars in damages. In places like Killington, Vermont, the scene was the same, where the expense of repair was huge and tragically of course, lives were lost as well. The Governor of Vermont said, ‘we didn’t used to get tropical storms, our storm patterns weren’t like Costa Rica, they were like, well, Vermont! The scientists are now saying we are experiencing in their phrase, ‘a new normal’. In southeast Asia, in the Philippines, those folks were hit by a super Typhoon Meiji (sp?), which had the strongest winds ever measured when a storm hit land fall…when it hit, they received 45 inches of rain in 48 hours… Brazil is feeling climate changes that are happening in the world, when there is a severe drought in areas that don’t normally have droughts, and when it rains too much in places where it doesn’t rain. The weather patterns are scrambled, and as we will see in a moment (see video!) the storms are just getting more and more intense. Why are there so many big down pours and floods throughout the world? Scientists are telling us that we are entering a new era. Global warming is contributing to an increased incidence of extreme weather because the environment in which all storms are formed has changed from human activity. One of the two largest re-insurance companies in the world, Munich-Re, said, ‘the only plausible explanation for the rise in weather related catastrophes is climate change. The view that weather extremes are more frequent and more intense due to global warming coincides with the CURRENT state of SCIENTIFIC KNOWLEDGE as set out in the fourth IPCC Assessment report.” (put that in your pipe and smoke it James, ‘climate change is the biggest hoax ever played on the American people‘, Inhofe (R-OK)).’ Al continues, “It is their BUSINESS (I can personally attest to this FACT) to be accurate, in understanding and estimating EXACTLY what is going on with events that incur risk. One of the most senior, distinguished scientists in the world said, ‘this is no longer conjecture or something based on computer models or a theory, it is REAL and it is happening RIGHT NOW.’ That is something that has emerged, really powerfully over this past decade. A scientist told me that there’s been this significant, subtle, but significant SHIFT, several people have said this to me. They used to say, and you have probably heard this, you can’t connect any single extreme weather event to climate, because we are changing the odds of those events occurring…we are ‘loading the dice’, (much like playing pin ball, as the ball still goes around the machine, but the machine is now tilted, thus, the outcomes are different), and NOW they are saying not only are we loading the dice, but we’re painting more dots on the dice, that is, we are not only rolling more ’12’s’, we’re now rolling 13’s and 14’s, soon to be rolling 15’s and 16’s.” Thank you Mr. Al Gore, you are a gentleman and a scholar, this study is only a quarter done, so I will leave with you with that for the moment, but alas, we will all have to face up to this REALITY soon enough… I think WE can all understand these very simple concepts, even republicans, but, be aware, there are many BAD actors out there who do not have anyone but their interests at heart, for, like crack cocaine, the addiction to oil and coal, the chief contributors to this looming ever present disaster, will be very difficult for the key players to ween themselves off from. Perhaps even worse, will be their weening from the ‘art of the deal’, the making of all of that profit, profit that comes at the expense of ALL of us in one form or another. They will continue to fight these presented FACTS at every turn, banking on the public’s lack of interest, short attention span, lack of KNOWLEDGE and assuming they are too stupid and easily manipulated by say, a FOX NEWS, to really get a handle on the enormity of the problem, let alone do anything about it. Yet unfortunately soon enough, another F-5 tornado will touch down, as it did fairly recently in Joplin, Missouri, where much of the large town looks like Godzilla turned it into a toothpick like rubble, and the poor people who lost everything are told, ‘there’s nothing to see here folks…’ Yeah, this all must be ‘God’s will’ right Rick? And as the crumbling infrastructure of this once great and proud nation falls by the way side and yet one more large storm takes out another community, this U.S. of A will have to close down for repairs, with the ghost of John Candy from the classic National Lampoon film, “Vacation”, whispering… “the country, I mean the park is closed, the moose outside should have told YA!” Have a nice day folks and remember, wooden nickles come in many different forms, and should not be accepted in any circumstance, your life just might depend on it. PRESERVE THE WILDERNESS! Peace~M
