By Paul Homewood
OK, when you get to be a dad it’s a pretty emotional thing, and you say some silly things. But this guy really has to be wacko! (Anyone naming his son River has got to be a bit sad, but when your surname is Weir it really takes the biscuit!)
Against all odds you were conceived in a lighthouse, born during a pandemic and will taste just enough of Life as We Knew It to resent us when it’s gone.
I’m sorry.
I’m sorry we broke your sea and your sky and shortened the wings of the nightingale.
I’m sorry that the Great Barrier Reef is no longer great, that we value Amazon
more than the Amazon and that the waterfront neighborhood where you burble in my arms could be condemned by rising seas before you’re old enough for a mortgage.
The scent of your downy crown makes my heart explode. The curl in your Tic Tac toes fills me with enough love to power New York City.
If only.
Instead, the milk in your bottle was warmed by dirty, ancient fuels and as a result, you will learn to walk on a planet that has never been this hot for humans.
We are just now wrestling with the implications of this but as your Pop, the most poignant evidence was seeing your mother give you your first kiss through a P100 mask that smelled faintly of smoke. I’m sorry my boy, but we were warned.
See, for decades, scientists told us that if we weren’t careful, humans would unleash an invisible enemy out of the jungle and into our lungs. But that was a story few wanted to believe.
So we kept cutting down jungles — and prairies and mangroves and the last few the places where the wild things are — to pave and plow, develop and devour everything inside.
https://edition.cnn.com/2020/04/25/weather/climate-change-bill-weir-letter-to-son/index.html
It goes on and on and on in that fashion. And remember this guy is CNN’s Chief Climate Correspondent!
His repeated attempts to blame the coronavirus on industrialisation are particularly delusional, but his claims that poor River Weir is going to grow up in some sort of industrialised apocalypse makes you wonder where his father has parked his brains.
According to Weir, the problems began long ago, in the 19thC. He writes how Eunice Foote’s experiments in 1856 proved the greenhouse theory, and how we all carried on burning fossil fuels anyway – to build a rich, glorious and comfortable world.
And of course this is the nub. Weir bemoans the coronavirus pandemic, what sort of world would his son be growing up in, if Eunice Foot’s warnings had been heeded?
Cholera, for instance, was endemic in 19thC America, killing tens of thousands at a time in wave after wave. In one outbreak in Chicago in 1854, cholera killed 5% of the population.
As historian William Beardslee wrote:
Disease has become a largely individual experience for Americans in the last third of the twentieth century. American communities no longer need react collectively to the threat to re-create the anxiety with which Americans, early in 1832 awaited a possible outbreak of cholera. As abruptly as the 1832 Second Cholera Pandemic appeared in New York, it dissipated and disappeared by December of the same year. It is unclear why it ended so abruptly. Perhaps it was the dispersal of people as they fled from New York, Buffalo, or Utica; or maybe it was a subtle change in New York’s summer climate that changed the disease’s life cycle. Some have suggested that despite the confusion propounded by the Miasmatics, the Contagionists and their "obsolete" quarantine theories were actually able to affect the disease’s movement. The answer is unknown. A similar epidemic, the Third Cholera Pandemic, returned to the United States in 1849. It is believed that over 150,000 Americans died during the two pandemics. Another 50,000 died in the Fourth Pandemic of 1866.
Then there were Yellow Fever, Smallpox, Typhoid, Scarlet Fever and a host of other goodies.
Which world would he rather his son grew up in?
via NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT
April 28, 2020 at 08:33AM
Iowa Climate Science Education 