Climate Change Denial - Planetary Suicide

Photograph Courtesy of the Tallahassee Democrat

Our summer’s hurricane season is not over, but it’s likely to cost Americans hundreds of billions of dollars between damages and lost revenue. It’s taken more than 300 lives with many mothers, fathers and children still unaccounted for. 

We started off with Hurricane Beryl which became the earliest recorded Category 5 storm to develop off our Atlantic coast.   Not long after that, it was followed by Hurricanes Helene and Milton, the latter demonstrating the fastest wind-intensification in our history - 60 to 180 MPH over the course of 36 hours!  According to NOAA, the inflation adjusted annual costs of weather and climate disasters between 1990 and 1999 averaged $33 billion. Over each of the last three calendar years, the average is $147 billion.

Every national disaster that destroys agricultural, commercial, or industrial enterprises passes the costs of rebuilding on to we consumers.  Those who lose loved ones pay their costs forever.

Worldwide we have experienced 13 months of record-breaking heat and the three hottest days on record.  The naive or distracted might blow off these aberrations as flukes, but they are part of the same deadly patterns which the scientific community has been warning us about for decades. 

To call climate change a hoax is beyond irresponsible. It is the ultimate betrayal of this phenomenal planet that we’ve been entrusted with. I’m reminded of a recent president who ignored the earliest phase of a pandemic out of ignorance and self-interests.  That would be the same pandemic which would trash economies worldwide including ours. The slow dragged-out response to Covid would be the same denialism that cost a million American lives between 2020 and 2021.  Any leader who down-plays an existential threat has proven themselves incapable of governing. 

If we truly love our country and say we are prolife, how can we morally defend leaders who prioritize economic prosperity over protecting the environment which sustains us and the unborn for countless generations to come?