If Cancun fails, it won’t be climate change that has “failed” it is our leaders and their short-sightedness, and our democracy.

As for Klem’s ridiculous jibe, he cannot grasp that global warming is but one aspect of a matrix of potentially existential threats including the rapidly spreading freshwater crisis; deforestation; desertification; species migration and extinction; ocean acidification; air/soil/water contamination; resource depletion;fisheries collapse; floods and droughts; increasing severe weather events; overpopulation and a variety of global security threats from nuclear proliferation to terrorism. Many of these are tangible. They can be measured and mapped by satellites and monitored by surface instruments.

The fact of global warming is beyond debate except to those who have shuttered their minds, including Rex Murphy. However even if global warming is taken out of the matrix, the remaining challenges demand many of the same solutions. Unfortunately if we cannot find the consensus to implement meaningful action for global warming mitigation and adaptation, we stand less of a chance of finding answers to these other difficulties.

But we in the West needn’t worry about dying from global warming. That’s a point well made by Gwynne Dyer in his recent book, “Climate Wars.”

So yeah, celebrate how greed, laziness and materialism win out over cleaner air, preservation of wildlife and the future of our natural habitat.

Cheers!

I don’t know when exactly he went crazy, but I found that I stopped tuning into cross-country checkup about 6 years ago. I’ll anecdotally guess that that marked Rex’s descent into babbling incoherent madness.