Year 2, Month 3, Day 29: Maybe If Springsteen Said It, They’d Pay Attention

The Asbury Park Press (NJ) discusses the conclusions of a local scientist who states that New Jersey’s coast is in danger from global warming:

LONG BEACH TOWNSHIP — While the economy may be the most immediate issue, climate change is on our doorstep, said Melanie Reding, education coordinator for the Jacques Cousteau Coastal Education Center in Little Egg Harbor.

Reding spoke Saturday about sea level rise and what warming oceans mean for New Jersey’s coast, to an audience at the Long Beach Island Foundation of the Arts and Sciences.

“New Jersey has a real issue,” Reding said. “Sixty percent of our population lives within the coastal region. We have low elevation and high population.”

The comments are a wellspring of stupid, with a few sensible voices bobbing up to the top of the froth.

Sent March 20:

When scientists announce that sea levels will rise dramatically by the end of the century, most of us just tune out; that’s a problem for our grandchildren, not for us. But this way of thinking is dramatically challenged by the facts of climate change. We’re in the early stages of a slow-motion catastrophe; if we care about our descendants (or indeed any future generations of humans) we must learn to think beyond the next season of “American Idol” — and into a future where our children and their children in turn will face the consequences of our generation’s oblivious wastefulness. And yet there are many people for whom the denialist shibboleths incessantly promulgated by our anti-science media form an essential supply of talking points. Scratch the surface of any climate-change “skeptic” and you’ll find something far more familiar: someone unwilling to accept responsibility or admit that change is necessary.

Warren Senders