FOR 50 YEARS, DAN RATHER HAS BEEN A JOURNALISTIC CONSCIENCE OF THE COUNTRY. DESPITE HIS RAILROADING BY THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION (HE WAS CORRECT IN HIS REPORTING OF W’S DESERTION FROM THE NATIONAL GUARD), HE HAS STAYED ACTIVE, INVOLVED, AND HIS VOICE IS NEEDED NOW MORE THAN EVER. HERE’S HIS IDEA TO MEMORIALIZE THOSE WHOSE DENIAL OF SCIENCE ARE CONDEMNING US TO IRREVERSIBLE ECOLOGICAL DAMAGE AND AN UNLIVABLE PLANET.
“I think we should erect a monument built from materials impervious to the elements and list the names of all the elected officials and others in positions of power today in the United States who refuse to stand with the science on climate change.
We can put this monument on the coast – say off Miami – and have its base equal to the lapping waves of high tide. As sea levels rise, the monument will begin to be submerged, at increasingly greater depths. It will become a symbol of the cynicism, stupidity, and folly of our age. And it will be important for future generations to know who was responsible for this failure of action and imagination as this global crisis crescendoed. When I see Donald Trump cast doubt on climate change, I am deeply disappointed. When I see him appoint climate change deniers to key posts in his cabinet, I am deeply worried. When I see those in the scientific community and elsewhere pushing back, I am determined to bring these voices of reason to light.
Science is not a conclusion. It’s a process. It’s also about the real world. Not a post-truth world. If you’re wrong as a scientist, it’s hard to keep that hidden for very long because others will do an experiment and show the limitations of your earlier conclusions.
All these climate change deniers are denigrating the very nature of scientific discovery. It’s the same enterprise that, in biological research, leads to the cures these climate deniers plead from their doctors, or the geological research that finds and extracts the raw materials that power these climate deniers’ lives, or the physics that makes these climate deniers’ modern technology work.
To cherry pick the science you like is to show you really don’t understand much of anything. That is your right. But when it affects my life, that of my family, the future direction of my country, and the health of our planet, than the ignorance is far from harmless. The world must remember what is happening here and perhaps the judgement of history might induce some to the action we so desperately need.”
UnclePuke 