Leaders of the biggest carbon-emitting nations like the United States just “sip their coffees and put their feet up” while the world burns from climate change, according to the newest alarmist screed on CNET.
“Against the backdrop of fire and smoke,” leaders keep ignoring the science, writes CNET’s science editor, Jackson Ryan, in a fanciful, apocalyptic essay this week, in what seems a desperate effort to ignite fury against climate change skeptics.
Sparing no hyperbole, Mr. Ryan suggested that despite all appearances to the contrary, “the world is on fire” while world leaders idly watch.
“In July, the Earth sweltered through its hottest month on record,” Ryan declares. “The Amazon roasted in August, with more than 80,000 fires reported in Brazil alone. California was ablaze in November, cutting power and forcing residents to flee their homes. The Arctic burned. Australia suffered through unprecedented bushfires.”
“For the first time in my life,” Ryan writes, “I can feel the effects of climate change. I can look out my window and see them in the thick, gray smoke clouds settling over the horizon.”
Despite the unconscionable inaction of world leaders, Ryan observes, the year’s climate news was not all bad, since it saw the rise of a young Swedish climate heroine.
The 2019 reckoning “arrived in the form of a pig-tailed, 16-year-old girl with a two-by-two cardboard sign,” Ryan proclaims. With her “School Strike for Climate,” Greta Thunberg has drawn “worldwide attention” and inspired millions to take to the streets for climate protests.
Not even catastrophes like these seem to bring any political action. How is this possible?
Because we still fail to make the connection between the climate crisis and increased extreme weather events and nature disasters like the #AustraliaFires
That’s what has to change.
Now. https://t.co/DQcZViKJQz— Greta Thunberg (@GretaThunberg) December 22, 2019
Not only was Thunberg named Time’s Person of the Year in 2019, Ryan writes, her movement inspired an escalation in discussions around climate change, which have become “more urgent and more aggressive.” As language began to change, we “stopped talking about climate change and started talking about the climate crisis, and states, countries, and scientists declared a ‘climate emergency.’”
More “dire warnings” were heard during December’s Climate Change Conference in Madrid, Ryan notes. “Every week — no, every day — there is a new peer-reviewed scientific paper in the world’s most prestigious science journals.”
“The pages of Nature, Science, The Lancet and Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences are stacked with new reports, revised estimates and terrifying models of future calamity,” he states.
Yet despite all this “evidence,” people still aren’t getting the message, Ryan laments. “In 2019, the internet is awash with climate denialism” and the battle has devolved into another front for the culture wars.
“It’s no longer believers versus denialists – it’s left versus right,” he states, in a potentially damning admission of the political character of climate alarmism.
What Mr. Ryan and his colleagues may not fully realize is that the more their rhetoric escalates into hysteria, the more level-headed people are likely to ignore them.
Alarmist language may “work,” as a spokesperson for Extinction Rebellion group recently proposed, but you can only scream that the sky is falling so many times before sensible people simply tune you out.
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