Earthquakes, landslides — and ski vacations

An article at The Guardian carries an ominous headline and a ridiculous block of supporting information. "Climate change: melting ice will trigger wave of natural disasters," the headline reports — only to be followed by the kinds of miserable attempts at persuasion that a planet full of apathetic idiots requires.

It's not enough that the planet will be rocked by "earthquakes, avalanches, volcanic eruptions... and tsunamis" within the next 50 years, or that methane, 25 times more destructive than CO2, is being released into the atmosphere right now. The methane which, in large part, was overlooked when scientists created their computer models to predict future destruction, and now multiplies those scenarios times 25.

It's not enough that 50 years from now is exactly the time when the babies being born today will be entering the prime of their lives. When they reach that prime, God help them if they've decided to have babies of their own, because they'll be seeing their children's world literally destroyed, piece by piece, along with their own.

Zzzzzzzzzzz. No one cares. Technology will fix it. Some magical new form of fuel and energy will be discovered that not only emits zero carbon dioxide and methane, but actually reverses all of those elements that were pumped into the atmosphere in one century.

That's not going to happen. So instead, the newspaper has to appeal to this inane scenario instead:

"The Alps, in particular, face a worryingly uncertain future.... Rock walls resting against glaciers will become unstable as the ice disappears and so set off avalanches. In addition, increasing meltwaters will trigger more floods and mud flows. For the Alps this is a serious problem. Tourism is growing there, while the region's population is rising. Managing and protecting these people [is] now an issue that needed to be addressed as a matter of urgency."

Oh no — tourism will suffer? This calls for immediate action! Protect the tourists! Don't protect the planet, or the global population, but by God protect those tourists in the Alps!

"Maybe the Earth is trying to tell us something," The Guardian quotes a scientists as saying.

Gee, ya think?

To be clear, this is not a critique of The Guardian or its reporting. It's an example of how desperate journalism has to become when it realizes that a story about billions of bodies, shattered economies, depleted resources, mass starvation and dehydration, and uncontrolled primitivism will have zero impact on its readers. But threaten their ski vacations in the Alps, and maybe, just maybe they might start to care.

Do something? Probably not. But caring is a start.

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