By David Taub
Daily, many people die of TSD – “Terminal Stupidity Disease” – although you won’t find it in medical books or on death certificates. But it is real.
Look no farther than the fools who refuse to wear a mask during the worst viral pandemic in over a century.
Currently, COVID-19 kills more than 4,000 Americans daily, with a total of 400,000 deaths lurking at our doorstep. So stunning are these catastrophic markers, just in January, that they have left EX-POTUS speechless, except for denying responsibility.
Then commeth “The Insurrection” – an attempted coup instigated by now EX-POTUS. This treasonous attack on our republic is too stunning for me to wrap my brain around it.
All those cowardly traitors complicit in this subversion must be held accountable. Sadly, Jan. 6, 2021 will regrettably stain America’s history as the time when our experiment with democracy was almost murdered.
On this ignominious list of traitors would be three GOP House members who allegedly colluded with one of the radical insurrection organizers (now in hiding), and power-hungry, megalomaniac, Ivy League-educated Senators.
Today, EX-POTUS is an international pariah; he suffers lonely as the only U.S. President twice impeached by a bipartisan majority in the House of Representatives, not ever witnessed before.
Correspondingly atrocious is the anti-science mythology that has strangled this country far too long; it infects many in one of our major political parties. Central to their anti-science mythology is that climate change is neither real nor caused by humans.
Around the time of Jesus, the world’s population was estimated at around 300 million, about the size of the U.S. during the 20th Century. Two-thousand years later, world overpopulation is a stunning 7.3 billion.
In only 30 more years, world overpopulation is expected to be NINE BILLION! That’s nine times a thousand million! A gigantic number by any calculation.
A fundamental evolutionary principle of humankind’s adaptation to climate change has been to migrate elsewhere. Lots of those 9 BILLION folks are going to attempt to migrate to your neighborhood, bringing with them the “gift” of profound social and political instability, pandemic diseases and global deaths of Biblical proportions.
Water scarcity is a major threat to life today; most countries do not have enough clean potable water to sustain ever-growing populations or to support agriculture needed to feed them. Climate change brings hotter climes, which exaggerates water scarcity, creating a metaphorical Damocles’ sword hanging over all our heads.
The year 2020 marked the hottest and driest year on record. In Australia, large swaths of territory were devastated by uncontrollable wildfires, at a level never experienced before. World-wide, magnificent forests and rich agricultural lands were destroyed, with uncounted deaths of precious wildlife.
In the U.S., frenzied, devastating wildfires raged uncontrolled throughout the western states. A record number of storms formed and made landfall, the most ever in one year. These climatological disasters were more savage that ever before, bringing indescribable destruction to the Mississippi delta area and the upper Great Plains states.
Glaciers throughout the world and ice are melting faster than ever. Unusually warm water beneath the Thwaites Glacier (about the size of Florida) has caused melting and contributed to increasing sea levels.
At its base, water temperatures greater than 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees F) ABOVE the normal freezing point have been recorded. Studies forecast its total collapse in a century or less. That is significant because these glaciers hold most of West Antarctic’s ice sheet in abeyance, and should they fail, America’s coastal cities, including Beaufort, will be underwater.
Some experts of The International Panel for Climate Change (IPCC) worry that we may already have passed the threshold tipping point of increases of two degrees centigrade in global warming.
This is not “chicken little” clucking that the sky is falling; it is “CHICKEN BIG” screaming that Spaceship Earth is in grave danger.
We must take drastic universal action to address this disastrous calamity, and do it now. World-wide climate change is a reality that isn’t going away just because too many fools refuse to acknowledge its seriousness or ignore it. It gets worse every year with hotter, dryer climes, vicious unpredictable storms, large swaths of land laid waste to people and agriculture, and billions crammed into too little space plundered by too many diseases.
The criminally treasonous attack on our government on Jan. 6, 2021, another date that shall live in infamy, pales by comparison to the existential threat posed by climate change.
This is real. It is NOT a hoax such as perpetrated by the anti-science minions. Mother Nature is very angry. She will penalize us in extremis if we do not heed her clarion call to placate her. Time, in this case especially TIDE, will wait for no one.
“Well, all I know is what I read in the newspapers.” – Will Rogers.
David M. Taub was Mayor of Beaufort from 1990 through 1999 and served as a Beaufort County Magistrate from 2010 to 2015. You can reach him at david.m.taub42@gmail.com.
