Politicizing Harvey - George Monbiot explains what others hide from.

"The media avoids the subject of climate breakdown – to do otherwise is to bring the entire infrastructure of thought crashing down."Sept, 2 http://www.monbiot.com/2017/09/02/dont-look-now/

Once again George Monbiot writes a sober realistic assessment - as opposed to the disconnected, delusional watered-down mishmash we are receiving from our leaders, too many cowered scientists who know better, and the profits driven news media in general - regarding the Harvey manmade global warming connection and what we must expect these next years.

At first I wanted to quote highlights and link to his article, but that just chopped up the narrative since Monbiot's writing is already plenty succinct.  Then I was going to quote the first few paragraphs and link to the original.  But I could not decide on an appropriate cut off.  

I’m driven to post the entire essay since it’s so rare for me to read something that hits every note and so closely aligns with my own decades long musings and frustrated attempts at communicating Earth's climate realities to other people.  Fortunately, Mr. Monbiot has already given me permission to reprint some of his articles, so here’s another must read. 

As I mentioned in my previous post this latest round of desperate climate science avoidance crystalized for me the image of a people desperately clinging to dreams of yesterday’s normal, like a child desperately clinging to her mother as they're being inexorably torn apart for all time.  Unfortunately, what we refuse to comprehend will harm, nay destroy all we’ve come to love about this world.

In the following George Monbiot once again offers the reader a cold sobering slap in the face, it ain't nice but it is the reality we made for ourselves.  Might as well honestly face what's arrived at our doorstep.  Can't say we didn't see it coming.

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Don’t Look Now

2nd September 2017

By George Monbiot, published in the Guardian 29 August 2017

(I've added some Bold highlights)

It is not only Donald Trump’s government that censors the discussion of climate change; it is the entire body of polite opinion. This is why, though the links are clear and obvious, the majority of news reports on Hurricane Harvey have made no mention of the human contribution.

In 2016, the United States elected a president who believes that human-driven global warming is a hoax. It was the hottest year on record, in which the US was hammered by a series of climate-related disasters. Yet the total combined coverage for the entire year on the evening and Sunday news programmes on ABC, CBS, NBC and Fox News amounted to 50 minutes. Our greatest predicament, the issue that will define our lives, has been blotted from our minds.

#8 Debating GOP Disconnect From Climate Science - It’s The Economy Stupid!

It didn’t take long for EM to get around to our economy as some sort of justification for ignoring the seriousness of what we are doing to our global life supporting climate system.  What confuses me EM, how the hell is ignoring an imminent destructive threat going to help economic sustainability?  What world will we be handing over to our children the next few decades?  Doesn’t that concern you at all? 

If you or anyone else could explain how that train of Republican logic works, I sure would appreciate a lesson.

The other point I will touch on in this installment is EM’s refusal to recognize the deliberate and strategic Republican attack on serious science.  But first let me jump ahead for a moment to EM’s key sentence.

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1. "me not wanting to cripple the national economy"

EM, have you never thought about how much weather impacts every aspect of the things that make our lives and economy hum?  

Our society and the biosphere that sustains us developed under the current climate regime - cranking up our atmospheric insulation, warming up and energizing our climate engine, think simple unavoidable physics, no way around it, we are already facing the cascading consequences of increasingly extreme wind and rain extremes, long lived heat ‘domes’ and droughts, followed by torrential downpours that can be more damaging than the withering drought was.  But, not just heat, also localized extreme cold events because of warm air mass excursions into the Arctic which in turn displaces the frigid Arctic air mass which blows down into temperate zones, a product of our planet’s Jet Streams, which are getting more meandering and erratic with every year on account of various geophysical changes over the past decades due to global warming.