Preoccupied Media Is Missing The Big Climate Change Story

By James Donahue

The constant media attention on the Michael Jackson death, the misbehavior by elected political power figures, the Senate hearings over the appointment of Judge Sonia Sotomayor to the U. S. Supreme Court and now the passing of media giant Walter Cronkite has dominated our nightly news for weeks.

Cronkite must have been ashamed as he watched the declension of the standards he spent a lifetime setting for those who were to follow him.

While all of this non-news news is filling the airways, people all over the world have been enduring the most extreme weather patterns we can remember. Searing heat waves, with temperatures rising well over the 100 to 110 degree mark, Fahrenheit, and crop killing droughts have been sweeping the southwest United States, India, portions of Europe and Australia. The heat is so severe people who cannot escape it are dying from heat stroke. Crops are withering in the fields.

Looking at the national weather map this week we see that the unusual cool temperatures are expected to prevail throughout the northeast for the remainder of this summer season. Thus folks from Minnesota east to Main are experiencing a non-summer summer.

And in the mid-section of the nation, where the extreme hot air is meeting the extreme cool air from the north, we are experiencing severe storms with hail, heavy rains, high winds and tornados. Rivers are flooding and crops that haven’t been knocked down by hail are standing in water-drenched fields. The storms of spring have not stopped. They continue to march across the land like freight cars behind a distant engine, sometimes swinging northward and at other times dipping south toward the Gulf Coast.

And in California, where people attracted by a temperate climate have packed into a hodge-podge of high-priced homes all along the Pacific coast, an unusual dry climate and the heat from blowing winds inland are setting the stage for a year-around barrage of wildfires. Santa Barbara County and other areas of Southern California are so dry they have issued a year-around fire danger alert.

If we add up all of the areas of severe weather, we must assume that there is an obvious new crisis brewing in the world. It will be a shortage of enough food to feed the estimated 6.5 billion people now packing this planet.

For those folks who still have their heads in the sand about the serious effects of carbon emissions, global warming and what human waste is doing to our environment and our planet, we suggest that you take a good look at the nightly weather reports, not only at home but from around the world.

They aren’t making a big deal about it, probably because they don’t want people to panic. Also there is a lot of pressure from big business to shut up about it. Cleaning up carbon emissions and the toxic mess we have made is a costly venture. But from where we sit, that is where the real news can be found.