Started my week with a Susan Ladd N&R column saying “we” need to turn up the heat on climate change deniers:
Remember that kid in third grade who blocked out anything he didn’t want to hear by sticking his fingers in his ears and saying, “la-la-la-I-can’t-hear-you”?
Well, apparently, he grew up to be governor of Florida.The Florida Center for Investigative Reporting quoted a former employee of the Florida Department of Environmental Protection as saying she and a colleague were forbidden to use the terms “climate change” and “global warming” in 2011 after Rick Scott became governor.
In the new vernacular of climate change denial, sea-level rise — to which Florida is particularly vulnerable — became “nuisance flooding.”
…“Recurrent flooding,” “climate disruption” and even “the weirding of the weather” were a few of the euphemisms created to talk about climate change by organizations that had no choice but to deal with the effects.
It’s past time to face this problem head on, call it what it is, and do what we can to address it in policy and practice.
What else should I expect from the ultra-liberal Ladd, you might ask—and you’d be right. What I didn’t expect was the comment from the University of Hawaii atmospheric scientist Gary Barnes in this NPR story on four simultaneous cyclones in the western Pacific and Indian Oceans.
Sure the NPR reporter was more than happy to raise the issue of climate change causing four simulnaneous cyclones, to which Barnes advised he “hold off on …..it happens.”
