Florida’s a goner, Boston’s imperiled and Hawaii may blow itself apart. The rising seas at Florida and Boston result from climate change, and the Hawaiian volcanic activity is a cause of climate change.
It’s tragic that President Trump calls climate change a hoax; it’s criminal that his regime seems determined to erode the few things we can do to minimize the human effect of climate change. I don’t know who are the more dangerous charlatans: the artful schemers who deny climate change or the willful hucksters who insist “We must stop climate change now.”
Florida’s peninsula is threatened by rising waters of the Atlantic Ocean, the Caribbean Sea and the Gulf of Mexico. But it’s not just coastal cities slipping under the sea; the rising oceans put pressure on the entire water table and thus inland cities will flood from storm waters that cannot drain off anywhere. Boston, like every port city from Halifax to Havana, is being reclaimed by the eternally changing seas.
The entire Hawaiian archipelago has been constantly changing because of volcanic activity and moving Pacific Ocean tectonic plates. Each of these phenomena contributes to climate change that has nothing to do with any human activity. The volcanic activity in Hawaii is millions of years old; the rising waters at Florida and Boston flow from global warming that began to end the last ice age perhaps 500,000 years ago.
Humans have been here for some 250,000 years and it’s delusional hubris to think we are exempt from laws of nature we imperfectly comprehend. But we must fully understand we can no more stop climate change than we can stop tectonic plates from shifting or volcanoes from erupting.
What we can do is reduce pollution and thus minimize the human perturbation of intrinsic evolutionary processes.
Paul M. Craig
Northampton