re: #17 albusteve

my 90 year old AGW skeptic mom has no clue about youtube or what democrats have to say…climate change proponents need a plan…the average voter is not gonna sit still for a physics sermon…as time goes by and there is no blowback the deniers become more entrenched…really shitty PR

It doesn’t take a physics sermon. It does take persistence and patience. It also takes anecdotes.

Has this summer been a bitch, or what? Tornadoes killing hundreds at a single pop, drought destroying the crops and the grazing in Texas, temperatures over 100 day after day, week after week.

What about the famine in Somalia? It can’t have been this bad all along, or there wouldn’t have been anybody there in the first place to now starve.

Didja hear about the floods in Pakistan? The forest fires darkening the skies of Moscow last summer, with temperatures pushing 100? Right, Moscow, the place where the Nazi juggernaut froze to death?

See the haboob rolling over Albuquerque?

Take a look at these before and after pictures of Glacier National Park. Nothing much left of ‘em, is there?

There’s an endless mass of such material. AGW is hitting our lives right now. Sure, from time to time there’s some cold snap and Dime Box TX sets a new record low for the day. But far more record highs are being posted nowadays than record lows.

Conversions are not to be accomplished in a day, or a week. Or in a year, perhaps. An arrogant tone is not an asset, even though you really do know you’re right. And some folk will never come around.

And the lung cancer-smoking tie in is real. Some of the exact same corporations have moved from shilling for the cigarette companies, to shilling for the Koch line. “Doubt is their product” is the title of a book citing chapter and verse on this.

It’s probably best to grant that increased CO2 does in fact have numerous benefits. There’s the CO2 fertilization effect. [If the atmosphere contained no CO2 at all, nothing much could grow on land.] Irkutsk, Russia, will have a milder climate. Greenland’s growing season will be extended, and the retreat of the ice caps will open new land to cultivation.

You see where I’m going with this? What’s good for the few is bad, very bad, for the many. There’s more people in Miami, or New Orleans, than in Greenland. The retreat of the icecap has consequences. Water now stored as ice atop the landmass will go into the oceans and raise sea level. Even a 3 foot rise over the century, and that would be just a down payment on what we’re in store for if we don’t get a handle on world consumption of fossil fuels, just 3 feet is no small thing.

Airports, roads, levees? Not built for a new and higher sea level. It’ll be expensive to replace or rebuild them.

What about our crops? What about our beef supply? A year from now, the price of beef will be much higher, because so many ranchers had to sell off their herds. No grass, no beef. All things being equal, temperature-wise, CO2 is a bit of a help to plant growth. But all things are not held equal. The price of that CO2 is higher temperatures, and the price is too damned high.

We don’t have to convince everyone. The very old are mostly set in their ways, but they won’t be setting policy a decade from now. This is a long, slow haul, and while there’s no time to waste, there’s time to make the case.

The Koch brothers can’t stuff the genie of science, nor the daily weather news, back in the bottle. Eventually, we’ll win this debate.