We are used to dire warnings of how climate change will alter the landscape of the planet in two hundred years, or five hundred. We still are stubborn in our belief that those distant disasters are distant, though; we have difficulty grasping the concept of those same things happening
while we watch.
Kress soon noticed that something was wrong. Puffins dine primarily on hake and herring, two teardrop-shaped fish that have always been abundant in the Gulf of Maine. But Petey's parents brought him mostly butterfish, which are shaped more like saucers. Kress watched Petey repeatedly pick up butterfish and try to swallow them. The video is absurd and tragic, because the butterfish is wider than the little gray fluff ball, who keeps tossing his head back, trying to choke down the fish, only to drop it, shaking with the effort. Petey tries again and again, but he never manages it. For weeks, his parents kept bringing him butterfish, and he kept struggling. Eventually, he began moving less and less. On July 20, Petey expired in front of a live audience. [...]
Why would the veteran puffin parents of Maine start bringing their chicks food they couldn't swallow? Only because they had no choice. Herring and hake had dramatically declined in the waters surrounding Seal Island, and by August, Kress had a pretty good idea why: The water was much too hot.
Suppose we were to discover that the
coastal floods and droughts and dustbowls and wildfires and freak winter storms and shifting ocean currents and
loss of fisheries and reef decimations and other extinction events we had blithely committed our grandchildren to bearing witness to were instead rudely not waiting that long, but happening
to us instead.
Discovering that, would we be more upset over the decades-long campaign to pooh-pooh the dire warnings, the plain measurements, and the science? Would we get angry? Would we demand we work to mitigate those no-longer-distant catastrophes with more urgency, now that we ourselves were paying the price and not our children or their children? If so, what does that say about us?
And if not?
Blast from the Past. At Daily Kos on this date in 2007—The Guardian Finds the "Prince of Darkness" Unrepentant:
Suzanne Goldenberg managed, somehow, to keep her lunch down during an interview with Richard Perle. The man who never met a war he didn't love sat through much of it all with a dog named "Reagan" in his lap.
With nearly two-thirds of Americans opposed to the war, one could be forgiven for thinking that Perle might be looking for cover. Earlier this year, Vanity Fair magazine published an article raising the astonishing prospect that Perle, one of the most ardent advocates of war on Iraq, had been having second thoughts. Asked whether it would have been possible to contain Saddam without military intervention, Perle told the magazine: "Maybe we could have." A neo-con recants! [...]
Ask Perle for his ideas on how to resolve the standoff over Iran's nuclear arsenal, and the formula is eerily familiar. He is not yet sure the time is ripe to carry out air strikes on Tehran. "But if the only way to prevent Iran from being a nuclear weapons power is to destroy one or more facilities that will give them that capability I see no moral basis for rejecting that option," Perle says.
Perle, as you may recall, was the fellow who wanted Israel to extend its disastrous mini-war with Hezbollah by attacking Syria, so his view of what does and does not have a "moral basis" might be called rather narrow.
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Tweet of the Day
On
today's Kagro in the Morning show, we started the morning with a little national security state chatter.
Greg Dworkin and
Joan McCarter served us up a full plate of great stories. Reviewing the reviews of Greenwald's book & the 1st Amendment Blind Spot. Handicapping the handicappers. Concerned about vets' health care? Expand Medicaid. Iran's bomb-making capacity is diminished. Had you heard? Abortion? Michael Boggs knows nothing about it! McConnell word salads his health care position. Bonkersghazi civil war continues. Speaking of which, Rand Paul gets himself four Pinocchios on the subject. End Times Alert: the latest thing NYCers are overspending on.
High Impact Posts. Top Comments.