Great read on Slate "How Global Warming Is Like Nuclear War"

[NRaleighLiberal]

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/interrogation/2017/11/how_global_warming_is_like_nuclear_war.html

Both are catastrophic and easier to ignore than to prevent.

By Isaac Chotiner

It hasn’t been a great few months for people concerned about global warming. Soon after President Trump announced that the United States would withdraw from the Paris climate accord, the United States was struck by numerous natural disasters that, even if not caused by rising temperatures, are just the sort of events that warming temperatures make more likely. Storms caused havoc from Texas to Florida to Puerto Rico, and fires ravaged Northern California. Meanwhile, Trump declared an end to the “war on coal,” and his administration is gleefully loosening every sort of environmental regulation.


To discuss the state of the planet, I spoke recently with Elizabeth Kolbert, a writer at the New Yorker and the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History, which looked at the calamitous result of human existence on our environment. When we spoke, the fires in Napa were still raging, and Kolbert was preparing to deliver the Jonathan Schell Memorial Lecture on the Fate of the Earth, which can be seen here. This interview has been edited for clarity.

Isaac Chotiner: Do you think that calling extreme weather, like some of the storms we have been seeing, a consequence of climate change is helpful to making the argument about how big a deal climate change is?

Elizabeth Kolbert: If you look at this string of warm days that we’re having in New England, and the wildfires we’re having right now in California, and the severe hurricanes that we just had in the Gulf of Mexico, it’s very difficult to pinpoint them and say “OK, this is a direct result of climate change.” But the long-term averages—and we increasingly have very good data sets on wildfires, on storms, on the first frost and the first frost-free days, and all of these things—tell us a very, very stark story. There’s just no getting around it. The flip side of this is a cold winter and so on, and people will say, “Oh, is this climate change?” as if it’s a joke. I assure you it is not a joke.


snip - much, much more to read at the link - many excellent points made and raised, and worth your time to read.