The Barn by Ralph Hagen for August 16, 2019

15 denier?

Stan won’t admit his carbon butt print is yuuuuge! In more ways than one.

The true believers in global warming/climate change/whatever aren’t going to like this cartoon!

Please don’t get political.

Lolol stepping on the hooves of the sacred goat of climate change.

go ahead. continue to make fun of what’s happening around you and deny all you want.

see how that works out

The glaciers up at Glacier Park have been receding for years. Maybe it’s all these cattle ranches we have in Montana.

Sad. But true.

I’ll deny denial.

Of course you should be talking about this. Please do. The only thing I ask is that you have a proper conversation, where you talk and listen.

The climate is always changing, ever since the planet was formed. The fact that it is changing now is nothing new. Although you should take the time to learn that how fast the climate is changing is very important. Normally it changes so slowly that people wouldn’t even notice in our short lifespans. In some cases it happened more rapidly (relatively speaking), like it has been over the last hundred years or so.

The problem is… the previous times that it happened fast resulted in mass extinctions, which is something we don’t want. Also, the times it happened fast typically had something abnormal trigger it (e.g. massive meteor). Scientists believe that we are the abnormal event that is causing this one. But even if they are wrong, that doesn’t change the fact that the climate is changing rapidly, which in turn will cause severe trouble for us. Either way we should be concerned about the consequences. If our farmland gradually dies off due to too much or too little rain, then we will suffer. Rising tides and increased storm events will cause economic havoc to Florida, dry summers will keep brining devastating wildfires to California… etc

Even if we put aside the “blame” (i.e. is this our fault?), we should still be worried about what is happening, and try to figure out how to mitigate the problems that are on the horizon.

over what period of time? There were at several 100 millions of years between ice ages. Homo sapiens have only been around a few million years. The first human civilizations about 6,000 years ago. And we’ve been pulling carbon out of the ground and pumping into the air for just a little over 100 years. So, please do stop with the “climate has changed before” arguments, please.

if we let some of these people have their way we wouldn’t have livestock anymore. Our grandchildren would be asking, “what’s a cow?”

I am intolerant of intolerance

No one will any knowledge about pollution denies that we have messed up the ozone layer. I learned that in the sixties. It’s getting big corporations to get on board with reducing our carbon footprint. Animals have been living far longer than we have without affecting the ozone layer, so let’s stop blaming them for this. It is fossil fuel that is the culprit.

Thanks Stan for summing up the politics of it so succinctly.