Worse Than Katrina, Worse than 9/11: Can We Please Start Dealing With Climate Change Now!
October 30, 2012 — SuzanTen years ago Global Warming was the subject of a slide show by Al Gore, the man the Supreme Court stole the Presidency from.
Tina and I saw the lecture when it became a documentary film, An Inconvenient Truth.
I had been interested in nature and the environment from the time I was a young child growing up among the mountains and lakes, hills and streams of the Adirondacks. Along with the forts and the history was the beauty of the mountains and the pollution produced by the mines and paper mills.
Rachel Carson’s book Silent Spring came out the same fall as the Cuban Missile Crisis.
That was fifty years ago.
It was the height of the Civil rights Movement. I had just admitted I was transsexual to my parents.
The left wing peace movement, became my cause. Folkies and hippies, poets and bohemians became my family.
A few years later the Ecology Movement was born, I saw Yosemite and read, the books of Edward Abbey.
But over the years I’ve met too many cult mind fuckers, too many people who peddle homeopathy, crystals, Rekei and astrology to not be skeptical.
So I read and examined what was happening in the world. I read James Hansen and Bill McKibben and dozens of others.
You want to know something. Those of us who have been hippie punched and called names for the last fifty years were right.
Now we have a storm that is like something out of a dystopian disaster film destroying New York, one of my favorite cities in this country, a city of incredible creativity and yes commerce too.
It was a city I first escaped to when I was trying my wings, I eventually chose San Francisco but the lessons I learned on Bleeker and Macdougal, Washington Square and the East Village were the lessons I needed to fly.
When I lived out on the Island ten years ago I was almost afraid to go to the city by myself, but when I went it was like visiting home. The streets and subways embraced me, the hotdog venders smiled at me the Strand book store near Union Square welcomed me.
I know New York will come back, it’s a tough city and the people are strong people with big hearts but it saddens me to watch this disaster happening.
Hurricane Sandy has drowned the New York I love
October 30, 2012 — SuzanFrom The Guardian UK: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/oct/30/hurricane-sandy-drowned-new-york-city
The subway is more than mass transit – it’s the city’s very roots. The idea of the metro swamped by cold, salt water is unbearable
Bill McKibben
guardian.co.uk, Monday 29 October 2012
New York is the city I love best, and I’m trying to imagine it from a distance tonight. The lurid, flash-lit instagram images of floating cars in Alphabet City or water pouring out of the East River into Dumbo, the reports of bridges to the Howard Beach submerging and facades falling off apartment houses – it all stings. It’s as horrible in its very different way as watching 9/11.
But it’s the subways I keep coming back to, trying to see in my mind’s eye what must be a dark, scary struggle to keep them from filling with water. The tide at the Battery has surged feet beyond the old record; water must be pouring into every entrance and vent – I hope some brave reporter is chronicling this fight, and will someday name its heroes.
For me, the subways are New York, or at least they’re the most crucial element of that magnificent ecosystem. When I was a young Talk of the Town reporter at the New Yorker, I spent five years exploring the city, always by subway. This was in the 1980s, at the city’s nadir – the graffiti-covered trains would pause for half an hour in mid-flight; the tinny speakers would reduce the explanation of the trouble to gibberish.
It was how I traveled, though – I didn’t even know how to hail a cab. For a dollar, you could go anywhere. And my boast was that I’d gotten out at every station in the system for some story or another. It may not have been quite true: the Bronx is a big and forgotten place, and Queens stretches out forever – but it was my aspiration.
Complete article at: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/oct/30/hurricane-sandy-drowned-new-york-city
Hurricane Sandy Cable News Coverage Avoids Talk Of Climate Change
October 30, 2012 — SuzanFrom Huffington Post: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/29/hurricane-sandy-cable-news-climate-change_n_2041434.html?1351566661
10/29/2012
NEW YORK -– With the presidential candidates grounded and news networks intensely focused on Hurricane Sandy, some suggested Monday that climate change and global warming — issues that were neglected during the presidential debates and that received scant coverage throughout the 2012 race — could finally be pushed to the forefront.
Foreign Policy’s David Rothkopf wrote that “Sandy will do more to draw attention to issues of climate change than all the candidates running for every office in the United States during this election cycle have done.” And The New Yorker’s Elizabeth Kolbert wrote that “Sandy makes the fact that climate change has been entirely ignored during this campaign seem all the more grotesque.”
Although Rothkopf and Kolbert each cautioned against attributing a single weather event –- even one as unusual as the oft-dubbed “Frankenstorm” –- directly to climate change, they and others have pointed out that warmer water temperatures and such extreme weather suggest a connection. “Some evidence that warming seas lead to worse hurricanes, so let’s hope Sandy reminds us of risks of climate change,” tweeted New York Times columnist Nick Kristof, who later sent his 1.3 million followers a link to the site Hurricane Sandy Speaks.
But while Sandy on Monday made many consider the potential dangers of global climate change — especially online and on Twitter — such concerns didn’t get similar attention on the cable networks that were covering the hurricane non-stop.
CNN began its rolling coverage of Hurricane Sandy at 4:30 a.m. and dispatched around 30 correspondents and anchors throughout the storm’s path. While CNN staffers braved harsh winds and rain for live shots on the beach or flooded streets, the network’s anchors and correspondents hadn’t mentioned “climate change” or “global warming” once by 4:30 p.m., according to a search using television monitoring service TVEyes.
Continue reading at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/29/hurricane-sandy-cable-news-climate-change_n_2041434.html?1351566661
Christian preacher blames gays for Hurricane Sandy
October 30, 2012 — SuzanYou would think these fuck would die from the load of weapons grade bullshit they contain.
These fuck are too stupid to believe in science, evolution or climate change even though they can see the latter happening right before their moronic eyes yet they feel free to spew their homophobic crap like it was some pearl of wisdom.
Time to tax the churches and so called ministers.
Time to treat religion like the superstitious pile of bullshit it is.
From Gay Star News: http://www.gaystarnews.com/article/christian-preacher-blames-gays-hurricane-sandy291012
Chaplain John McTernan has said God’s judgment of gays caused the hurricane nearing the east coast of the United States
By Joe Morgan
29 October 2012
An anti-gay Christian preacher is already blaming Hurricane Sandy on gays.
As the east coast of the United States prepares for the storm, which has already killed 60 people in the Caribbean, author and chaplain John McTernan has decided who is at fault.
On his website Defend Proclaim The Faith, the preacher says the gathering storm must be God’s judgment on gays, and punishing the president Barack Obama for coming out in support of marriage equality.
He believes ever since George Bush Sr signed the Madrid Peace Process to divide the land of Israel in 1991, ‘America has been under God’s judgment since this event.’
McTernan said: ‘Obama is 100% behind the Muslim Brotherhood which has vowed to destroy Israel and take Jerusalem.
‘Both candidates are pro-homosexual and are behind the homosexual agenda. America is under political judgment and the church does not know it!’
His reasoning for this is that it has been 21 years since the ‘perfect storm’ of October 1991.
Continue reading at: http://www.gaystarnews.com/article/christian-preacher-blames-gays-hurricane-sandy291012
Why ‘Frankenstorm’ Is Just Right for Hurricane Sandy
October 30, 2012 — SuzanFrom The Daily Beast: http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/10/26/bill-mckibben-on-why-frankenstorm-is-just-right-for-hurricane-sandy.html
Sandy, the hurricane that appears set to pummel the East Coast, promises a historic potential for damage and a terrifying look at what may be in store for us—ever more frequent assaults of not-so-natural origin.
by Bill McKibben
Oct 26, 2012
Watching Sandy on her careening path toward the Eastern Seaboard scares me more than it would have 15 months ago. That’s because my home state took the brunt of Irene, last year’s “sprawling,” “surly,” “record-breaking” Atlantic storm. I know now exactly how much power a warm sea can contain and how far that pain can spread.
And in the process, feeling that fear, I begin to sense what the future may be like, as more and more of the world finds itself facing ever-more-frequent assaults from the amped-up forces of the not-so-natural world.
You can’t, as the climate-change deniers love to say, blame any particular hurricane on global warming. They’re born, as they always have been, when a tropical wave launches off the African coast and heads out into the open ocean. But when that ocean is hot—and at the moment sea surface temperatures off the Northeast are five degrees higher than normal—a storm like Sandy can lurch north longer and stronger, drawing huge quantities of moisture into its clouds, and then dumping them ashore.
Last year that dumping happened across Vermont. In some places we broke absolutely every rainfall record. It turned our streams and rivers into cataracts that took out 500 miles of state highway. A dozen towns were left completely cut off from the rest of the world, relying on helicopters to drop food. I know the odds are slim that we’ll find ourselves in the bull’s-eye again. But someone will.
This time the great damage may be along the coast. Even as we’ve built up our coastal populations, sea level has begun to climb. There are already cities along the coast that flood easily at the month’s high tide. This storm may hit when the moon is full, and it may dump so much rain that the water will be coming from both directions. Or maybe across the Appalachian highlands will be where it does its biggest damage, mixing with an inland storm front to dump snow on forests still in leaf. But someplace is going to take it on the chin, maybe harder than it ever has before.
And that’s the world we live in now. James Hansen, the NASA climatologist, published a paper earlier this year showing how the seemingly small one degree we’ve already warmed the earth has made extreme weather far more likely. The insurance industry has published a series of warnings in recent years saying the same thing. The world grows steadily more unpredictable, and hence we grow less comfortable in it.
Continue reading at: http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/10/26/bill-mckibben-on-why-frankenstorm-is-just-right-for-hurricane-sandy.html
Sandy Teaches a Lesson
October 30, 2012 — SuzanFrom Truth Dig: http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/sandy_teaches_a_lesson_20121029/
By Eugene Robinson
Posted on Oct 29, 2012
Back when he was being “severely conservative,” Mitt Romney suggested that responsibility for disaster relief should be taken from the big, bad federal government and given to the states, or perhaps even privatized. Hurricane Sandy would like to know if he’d care to reconsider.
The absurd—and dangerous—policy prescription came in a GOP primary debate in June. Moderator John King said he had recently visited communities affected by severe weather, and noted that the Federal Emergency Management Agency “is about to run out of money.”
“There are some people … who say, you know, maybe we’re learning a lesson here that the states should take on more of this role,” King said. “How do you deal with something like that?”
Romney replied: “Absolutely. Every time you have an occasion to take something from the federal government and send it back to the states, that’s the right direction. And if you can go further and send it back to the private sector, that’s even better.”
Romney went on to express the general principle that, given the crushing national debt, “we should take all of what we’re doing at the federal level and say, ‘What are the things we’re doing that we don’t have to do?’”
King gave him a chance to back off: “Including disaster relief, though?”
Romney didn’t blink. “We cannot—we cannot afford to do those things without jeopardizing the future for our kids,” he said, adding that “it is simply immoral … to rack up larger and larger debts and pass them on to our kids.”
Now, with an unprecedented and monstrous storm bashing the East Coast, this glib exercise in ideological purity is newly relevant. Was Romney really saying that the federal government should abdicate the task of responding to natural disasters such as the one now taking place? Yes, he was. Did he really mean it? Well, with Romney, that’s always another question.
Continue reading at: http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/sandy_teaches_a_lesson_20121029/
Ahead of Sandy, New Yorkers say ‘End Climate Silence’
October 30, 2012 — SuzanFrom Common Dreams: http://www.commondreams.org/view/2012/10/29-3
by Jamie Henn
Published on Monday, October 29, 2012 by Common Dreams
A big crowd of volunteers joined 350.org in Times Square on Sunday to unfurl a giant parachute with the message “End Climate Silence” and an image of a hurricane.
“Meteorologists have called this ‘the biggest storm ever to hit the U.S. mainland,’ which is a reminder of how odd our weather has been in this hottest year in American history,” said 350.org founder Bill McKibben. “But mainly it’s a reminder of how much we need to take care of each other when disaster strikes–we hope everyone will pitch in with the Red Cross, and with local relief efforts. Community is our greatest source of energy, and our cleanest!”
As Hurricane Sandy barrels down on the East Coast, scientists are connecting the dots between increasingly extreme weather and global warming. Yet for most of this year’s presidential election, the words “climate change” have gone unmentioned. The issue was not raised in a presidential debate for the first time since 1988.
Scientists warn that climate change is loading the dice for extreme weather events like Hurricane Sandy. The Earth’s average global temperature has risen between 1.5 and 2 degrees Fahrenheit over the past century and the warmer temperatures mean that the atmosphere holds about 4% more moisture than it did in 1970, leading to greater rainfall.
Continue reading at: http://www.commondreams.org/view/2012/10/29-3
Women Born Transsexual 