Open Thread And Cartoon Of The Week: ‘Blind Faith Of Climate Change Deniers Endangers Us All’

First published on ClimateProgress.org, a project of the Center for American Progress Action Fund, which was recently named one of Time magazine’s Top 25 blogs of 2010.

Opine away!

Two-time Pulitzer Prize-winner David Horsey had a cartoon and column in the L. A. Times this week, “Blind faith of climate change deniers endangers us all.” Here’s an excerpt:

Great harm is what comes from denying scientific facts about 21st century issues. That is the concern of the second Newsweek article. Written by Mark Hertsgaard, author of “Hot: Living Through the Next Fifty Years on Earth,” it documents a stark threat to mankind’s food supply:

“By 2050, scientists project, the world’s leading wheat belts — the U.S. and Canadian Midwest, northern China, India, Russia, and Australia — on average will experience, every other year, a hotter summer than the hottest summer now on record. Wheat production in that period could decline between 23 and 27 percent, reports the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), unless swift action is taken to limit temperature rise and develop crop varieties that can tolerate a hotter world.”

Hertsgaard takes the reader to North Dakota, where climate change has forced production of durum wheat from the east into the west of the state. Ironically, farmers are now bumping up against the oil boom in western North Dakota that is gobbling up farmland, sucking up vast quantities of water and flaring huge amounts of natural gas into the atmosphere, thereby exacerbating the ongoing rise in global temperatures that are threatening not only wheat crops, but rice and corn as well.

Yet, even though the consequences of climate change are becoming frighteningly obvious and, as Hertsgaard writes, “scientists at both the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the Environmental Protection Agency linked the record heat and drought of summer of 2012 with man-made climate change,” far too many conservatives cling to a blind faith that climate science is a hoax. Doug Goehring, North Dakota’s Republican agriculture commissioner, is typical of them all. Rather than believe the science, he says, “I believe an agenda is being pushed.”

Yes, it is — but it is the agenda of oil companies and other extracting industries that will not let a looming peril to humanity get in the way of their profits. And it is the climate change deniers in Congress and in state governments who faithfully push that agenda and will not be dissuaded, even by a host of angels.

Related Posts:

• Humans Are Not Like Slowly Boiling Frogs … We Are Like Slowly Boiling Brainless Frogs
• My Nature Piece On Dust-Bowlification And the Grave Threat It Poses to Food Security