Late Night Blogging

On Friday morning, the radio show featured a week's news about the war in Afghanistan. The link is from our sister site and it's pretty much a collection of links to  mostly alarming reports about course of the war for the NATO allies. For example, from the Washington Post: With most Afghan and NATO troops stationed in the country's south and east, villagers in the path of the Taliban advance into the once-peaceful north say they are powerless and terrified, confused by the government's inability to prevail -- and ready to side with the insurgents to save their own lives. Go read at the whole post and don't be surprised when the realization that in spite of all that you may have read previously, things are deteriorating for the NATO allies in the Afghanistan war.

In Pakistan, floods have not just devastated the lives of millions of people, they now present an unparalleled national security challenge for the country, the region and the international community. Lest anyone under-estimate the scale of the disaster, all four of Pakistan's wars with India combined did not cause such damage.

And there are a myriad of other problems that have been created: Millions of acres of crops have been destroyed and villages washed away. Joblessness and helplessness will lead to more young men joining the militants ...and the floods have not stopped the rampant violence in the country. The Pakistani Taliban continue to carry out suicide bombings and assassinations and have vowed to wipe out the Awami National Party which governs KP province. The Taliban are now threatening to prevent Pakistani non-governmental organisations from carrying out relief work.


There's also the scourge of water-borne diseases and the risk of an epidemic:

NYT's Talks Climate Change!

The MSM has been the lap dog of corporate interests for the first decade of this new century. They have deliberately muddied the waters over the issue of ACC (anthropogenic climate change) to the point where most in the west do not believe the changes in the climate have been caused by human activity even though as the National Academy of Sciences reports, 97–98% of the climate researchers most actively publishing in the field support the tenets of ACC outlined by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

It's not that the MSM doesn't report what's going on it that it's mixed in with opinions on what's going on and those opinions are given equal weight with scientific fact. So if you haven't been paying close attention to the debate but relying instead on your local fish wrap to keep you informed you can be excused for not knowing what's really taking place.

Well, the extreme weather events that have been taking place around the world this year (floods that have battered New England, Nashville, Arkansas, Oklahoma, Saskatchewan, and a deluge in Pakistan that has one fifth of the country under water and has affected the lives of 20 million people -- summer heat waves that have baked the eastern United States, parts of Africa, eastern Asia, and Russia, which lost millions of acres of wheat and thousands of lives in a drought worse than any other in the historical record), has the MSM outlets finally getting around to reporting on the link between all this and climate change. The New York Times has joined the chorus along with the BBC, Reuters, USA Today and Time all reporting on these long ago predicted consequences.

What's important to remember in the discussion of ACC is that there's a lot more to this than extreme weather. For example the changing climate is the cause of great swaths of pine trees that are dead or dying from a disease called white pine blister rust caused by the the mountain pine beetle. These forests used to be immune because of harsh winters and cool summers. Now, the warmer winters and summers have allowed the beetle to breed quickly and to move to the higher elevations favored by white bark pines.