Heat, Flooding, Fires, BP and Tiger: A Year to Remember
Linking Tiger Woods, the BP oil spill and the current state of weather related events around the world may seem like a stretch. Please humour me for a few hundred words, by the end of this piece; it may not seem like a stretch.
The inspiration (if you can call it that) for this blog came from watching a piece last week on ABC News. Clayton Sandell, an ABC reporter, asked experts whether they believe that recent incidents around the world, such as the forest fires in Russia, the heat waves around the world, and the flooding in Pakistan where related to global warming. The good news is that they did talk to respected scientists who stated that there certainly is a link (kind of perverse to call it good news); the bad news was that they also gave Oklahoma Senator Jim Inhofe air time in the news piece.
Inhofe certainly has an interesting approach to explaining why climate change is not happening (note he is one of the most of vocal of remaining climate change deniers kicking around). The reporter told Inhofe that the summer of 2010 will go down as the hottest on record – his response included “A few days here and there means nothing”, “we are currently nine years of a cooling trend” and “look at the snow that fell on the east coast last winter, that is evidence that this global warming thing is not happening”.
Last time I checked, temperatures are getting hotter decade over decade, and about the snow? Roughly 90% of the North American east coast is experiencing a trend of increased precipitation as a result of increasing temperatures. Last time I checked, snow is precipitation!
So what has this got to do with BP and Tiger Woods?
The link to BP isn’t that hard – the risk of environmental disaster (beyond climate change) is high when things go wrong when extracting oil.
So what do Tiger, BP and this summer have in common? The ugly underbelly of all things we enjoy are showing their true colours.
· All but a few people knew Tiger was doing what he was doing while the rest of us enjoyed watching his golf. Some of Tiger’s inner circle must have known his escapades would end badly.
· We happily consume oil from the Gulf (and everywhere for that matter), but a few people on that rig figured it was a ticking time bomb, they were correct – they likely knew it would end badly.
· Millions of people around the world are, right now, being affected by extreme heat, smoke, forest fires, and flooding. For those who have lost their lives as a result, their lives ended badly.
How many more ghosts are in our collective closet?
We have to stop merrily rolling along and assume all things are ok. We have to demand transparency, ethics and honesty from public officials, business, and even athletes. We cannot continue to allow cancers to fester while we roll along in denial of all things that can harm us in the near and distant future. Our collectively financial obesity caught up to us in the last year or so, Tiger’s behaviour caught up to him last year, and ignoring the impact of a warming planet is catching up to us now. When we will take our collective head out of the sand and work together towards a course of financial, health and environmental sustainability? There are certainly enough of us trying, just not enough people listening and acting on it yet!
Enough venting for now J