Starting at 8 pm (east coast) tonight, starting in New York City, Al Gore is running another “24 Hours of Reality” — bringing searing (and searingly accurate) discussions of climate disruption reality, from a global perspective and, hour-by-hour, regional discussions. Whether scorched by hot temperature records, burned out of home by wild fires, sitting in darkened homes due to Derecho(s), digging out sand from Hurricane Sandy, paying higher prices for food due to crop failures, and …, we are all feeling the impacts of climate disruption in our daily lives: whether we realize it or not.
While the American political system teeters on collapse due to the created “Fiscal Cliff” crisis and pundits waxed endlessly about the need to avoid leaving such a debt to and creating future generations, the political elite remain mainly within their climate silence bubbles with too rare excursions into mentioning of “climate change” with rapid retreats to the comfort zone of battling over whether the poor, embattled multi-billionaires can handle a few tenths of a percent reduction in the tax subsidies for the real takers of 21st century America: the super-wealthy who want everything from government while seeking all tools to avoiding paying to maintain and improve the society that enabled them to amass such fortunes.
Amid the Do The Math tour (eloquently discussed here and here), this 24 hours of Climate Reality discussion is a tool to help spark the nation to focus on the real burden that we are creating for ourselves and future generations: the mounting risks of climate disruption driven by our fossil foolish energy practices.
Some material from the Climate Reality page about the 24 hours …
DIRTY WEATHER
Let’s face it: The weather outside is different than it used to be. Record heat waves make it a chore to go outside. Floods and rainstorms damage our homes and cities. Crops wilt under severe droughts. Hot, dry weather sparks widespread fires.This is the extreme weather you see almost every day on the news — or out your window. This is Dirty Weather. And because of man-made climate change, we can expect it to happen a lot more often.
We’re polluting our atmosphere with Dirty Energy like coal, oil, and gas. The result? The planet heats up. And we expose ourselves to Dirty Weather: Floods, droughts, heat waves, wildfires.
We’ll always have to live with bad weather sometimes. But we don’t have to live with Dirty Weather. We can make the switch from dirty to clean energy … and together, we can stop the pollution that’s disrupting our climate.