Wednesday, July 10, 2013

Canada: Welcome to climate change, Toronto

This evening the biggest city in Canada experienced what The Star (with typical Canadian understatement) calls a?Toronto summer storm. My Twitter buddy Jason Anthony Tetro says that the city took half the rainfall that New York City saw from Sandy?in just three hours.

Other tweeters tell me that Toronto's mayor, his household blacked out like those of 300,000 other Torontonians, has put his family in their SUV, where they can at least beat the heat with air conditioning.

This is the kind of event that gives a bad name to climate-change denialism, which has been a feature of our present Conservative government. But I doubt it will make much difference. Ottawa and the provincial governments will continue to obsess about pulling oil or bitumen or natural gas out of the ground and shipping it to whoever wants to buy it, never mind the climatic and health consequences of burning the stuff.

Consequences like the Lac M?gantic disaster this weekend in Quebec, where a runaway train of tanker cars carrying crude oil derailed, exploded, and blew the downtown out of that little city. Thirteen are known dead, and another 37 or so are still missing.

I suspect many of the denialists, and those who bankroll them, know perfectly well that they're wrecking the planet. Perhaps they think they'll be able to pay for some protected island or mountain valley where they can survive in comfort, like bank robbers who hope to hide out in some law-abiding community where people don't steal from you.

Good luck with that hope, and with the hope of escaping the diseases spreading on the wings of climate change.

Source: http://crofsblogs.typepad.com/h5n1/2013/07/canada-welcome-to-climate-change-toronto.html

NCAA Championship Game michigan basketball ncaa final four Evil Dead halle berry kurt cobain Kamala Harris

No comments:

Post a Comment