Beachfront property -- in my lifetime...I should certainly look forward to that, particularly if I don't have to move. Here we are at the top of a small hill at the very Southern end of Jamaica Plain. Our tiny lawn towers 64 feet above sea level.
So the polar caps and glaciers are melting. The sea around here could easily rise 20 to 25 feet.
Yet, as much as I love ocean swimming and beachcombing, I would pass up this one chance to transport my house almost magically to the brine. Hyde Park Avenue is my boat launch!
All that it would require would be the continued inertia of the one country -- as in this one -- that could make all the difference in global warming. If we instead believe George the Lesser and conservative entertainers -- Limbaugh, Coulter, Cheney and their running dogs, the trainloads of data and science over the past 60 years are wrong, all wrong. We need only skip and jump our way to an ever brightening future.
Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth is both the adjective and noun. We recently saw it as family. I must confess that the four of us found the preponderance of scientific evidence more convincing than the Bush administration's never-mind dismissals.
I find myself halfway to that JP beach, when Parade chimes in. Today's hugely circulated Sunday supplement, features the topic in the cover story How Climate Change Affects You Right Now: A Special Report.
Now suddenly, we are in danger of exposing the public to truth and knowledge. If Newsweek and Fox News join Parade, the masses will ask embarrassing questions. When one of this unholy triumvirate grabs and issue, Oprah can't be far behind and even sugar-coated Republican lies turn bitter.
Both Parade and our chum Uncle have some lifestyle changes we can all do. Yet, how much easier it would be to pretend, as Newsweek and our own local dodo columnist Jeff Jacoby have a long history of doing. No, come to think of it, it really isn't much easier.
We have failing car companies telling us that it would be too demanding to require them to produce cars that get more than 30 miles per gallon. That alone would have the largest impact on both global warming and foreign petro consumption. Immediately this leads to an embarrassing set of questions, including, how is it that the major foreign car companies have all done this already, and why are the two U.S. companies who refuse the only ones who are going bankrupt while the overseas competitors are thriving? Think. Think. Think.
To An Inconvenient Truth, I must agree with Uncle that it is a call to quite achievable action and not a moment of hopelessness. It does highlight what John Stewart calls on his The Daily Show the views of a "fringe group of radical liberals, known as 'scientists.'"
Daily Show Note: The above like pops up the video. If you block pop-ups, go to the main site, to the Daily Show videos and then play CO2 No Evil.
It looks like I lose my Cape Cod Northwest beach below Forest Hills. When the mainstream, monosyllabic mags get behind something, it's pop culture and unstoppable.
The good news for the arch-conservative deniers is that they get an out. They can turn from non-scientific pretext to condescension. They can suddenly claim, "Well, just in case there is anything to this hysteria, we can try these remedies. They probably won't hurt anything.
Thank you, Parade. I'll hold off buying the surfboard.
Tags: massmarrier, Massachusetts, global warming, Al Gore, Inconvenient Truth, Parade Magazine
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