——By——
Rowan Jacobsen

[Photo: Coral bleaching in the Great Barrier Reef. (AAP Image/University of Queensland/Ove Hoegh-Guldberg) ]

For most of its life, the reef was the world’s largest living structure, and the only one visible from space. It was 1,400 miles long, with 2,900 individual reefs and 1,050 islands. In total area, it was larger than the United Kingdom, and it contained more biodiversity than all of Europe combined. It harbored 1,625 species of fish, 3,000 species of mollusk, 450 species of coral, 220 species of birds, and 30 species of whales and dolphins. Among its many other achievements, the reef was home to one of the world’s largest populations of dugong and the largest breeding ground of green turtles.

The reef was born on the eastern coast of the continent of Australia during the Miocene epoch. Its first 24.99 million years were seemingly happy ones, marked by overall growth. It was formed by corals, which are tiny anemone-like animals that secrete shell to form colonies of millions of individuals. Its complex, sheltered structure came to comprise the most important habitat in the ocean. As sea levels rose and fell through the ages, the reef built itself into a vast labyrinth of shallow-water reefs and atolls extending 140 miles off the Australian coast and ending in an outer wall that plunged half a mile into the abyss. With such extraordinary diversity of life and landscape, it provided some of the most thrilling marine adventures on earth to humans who visited. Its otherworldly colors and patterns will be sorely missed.

To say the reef was an extremely active member of its community is an understatement. The surrounding ecological community wouldn’t have existed without it. Its generous spirit was immediately evident 60,000 years ago, when the first humans reached Australia from Asia during a time of much lower sea levels. At that time, the upper portions of the reef comprised limestone cliffs and innumerable caves lining a resource-rich coast. Charlie Veron, longtime chief scientist for the Australian Institute of Marine Science and the Great Barrier Reef’s most passionate champion (he personally discovered 20 percent of the world’s coral species), called the reef in that era a “Stone Age Utopia.” Aboriginal clans hunted and fished its waters and cays for millennia, and continued to do so right up to its demise.

Worldwide fame touched the reef in 1770, when Captain James Cook became the first European to navigate its deadly maze. Although the reef was beloved by nearly all who knew it, Cook was not a fan. “The sea in all parts conceals shoals that suddenly project from the shore, and rocks that rise abruptly like a pyramid from the bottom,” he wrote in his journal. Cook’s ship foundered on one of those shoals and was nearly sunk, but after several months Cook escaped the reef.

After that, the reef was rarely out of the spotlight. A beacon for explorers, scientists, artists, and tourists, it became Australia’s crown jewel. Yet that didn’t stop the Queensland government from attempting to lease nearly the entire reef to oil and mining companies in the 1960s—a move that gave birth to Australia’s first conservation movement and a decade-long “Save the Reef” campaign that culminated in the 1975 creation of Great Barrier Reef Marine Park, which restricted fishing, shipping, and development in the reef and seemed to ensure its survival. In his 2008 book, A Reef in Time, Veron wrote that back then he might have ended his book about the reef with “a heartwarming bromide: ‘And now we can rest assured that future generations will treasure this great wilderness area for all time.’” But, he continued: “Today, as we are coming to grips with the influence that humans are having on the world’s environments, it will come as no surprise that I am unable to write anything remotely like that ending.”

In 1981, the same year that UNESCO designated the reef a World Heritage Site and called it “the most impressive marine area in the world,” it experienced its first mass-bleaching incident. Corals derive their astonishing colors, and much of their nourishment, from symbiotic algae that live on their surfaces. The algae photosynthesize and make sugars, which the corals feed on. But when temperatures rise too high, the algae produce too much oxygen, which is toxic in high concentrations, and the corals must eject their algae to survive. Without the algae, the corals turn bone white and begin to starve. If water temperatures soon return to normal, the corals can recruit new algae and recover, but if not, they will die in months. In 1981, water temperatures soared, two-thirds of the coral in the inner portions of the reef bleached, and scientists began to suspect that climate change threatened coral reefs in ways that no marine park could prevent.

By the turn of the millennium, mass bleachings were common. The winter of 1997–98 brought the next big one, followed by an even more severe one in 2001–02, and another whopper in 2005–06. By then, it was apparent that warming water was not the only threat brought by climate change. As the oceans absorbed more carbon from the atmosphere, they became more acidic, and that acid was beginning to dissolve the living reef itself.

Concerned for the reef’s health, a number of friends attempted interventions—none more poignant than Veron’s famed 2009 speech to London’s 350-year-old Royal Society titled “Is the Great Barrier Reef on Death Row?” Veron quickly answered his own question in the affirmative: “This is not a fun talk to give, but I’ve never given a more important talk in my life,” he told the premier gathering of scientists, accurately predicting that atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations of 450 parts per million (which the world will reach in 2025) would bring about the demise of the reef.

No one knows if a serious effort could have saved the reef, but it is clear that no such effort was made. On the contrary, attempts to call attention to the reef’s plight were thwarted by the government of Australia itself, which in 2016, shortly after approving the largest coal mine in its history, successfully pressured the United Nations to remove a chapter about the reef from a report on the impact of climate change on World Heritage sites. Australia’s Department of the Environment explained the move by saying, “experience had shown that negative comments about the status of World Heritage-listed properties impacted on tourism.” In other words, if you tell people the reef is dying, they might stop coming.

By then, the reef was in the midst of the most catastrophic bleaching event in its history, from which it would never recover. As much as 50 percent of the coral in the warmer, northern part of the reef died. “The whole northern section is trashed,” Veron told Australia’s Saturday Paper. “It looks like a war zone. It’s heartbreaking.” With no force on earth capable of preventing the oceans from continuing to warm and acidify for centuries to come, Veron had no illusions about the future. “I used to have the best job in the world. Now it’s turned sour… I’m 71 years old now, and I think I may outlive the reef.”

The Great Barrier Reef was predeceased by the South Pacific’s Coral Triangle, the Florida Reef off the Florida Keys, and most other coral reefs on earth. It is survived by the remnants of the Belize Barrier Reef and some deepwater corals.

In lieu of flowers, donations can be made to Ocean Ark Alliance.

Source: Outside.

Note to Commenters
Due to severe hacking attacks in the recent past that brought our site down for up to 11 days with considerable loss of circulation, we exercise extreme caution in the comments we publish, as the comment box has been one of the main arteries to inject malicious code. Because of that comments may not appear immediately, but rest assured that if you are a legitimate commenter your opinion will be published within 24 hours. If your comment fails to appear, and you wish to reach us directly, send us a mail at: editor@greanvillepost.com

We apologize for this inconvenience. 

=SUBSCRIBE TODAY! NOTHING TO LOSE, EVERYTHING TO GAIN.=
free • safe • invaluable

Nauseated by the
vile corporate media?
Had enough of their lies, escapism,
omissions and relentless manipulation?

=By= Paul Brown

[Photo: A farmer in China spreads pesticide on her crops. Image: IFPRI via Flickr]

With the impacts of climate change threatening food supply as population grows, China is buying land on other continents to grow more crops.

China is protecting itself against future food supply problems caused by climate change by buying or leasing large tracts of land in Africa and South America, a leading UK climate scientist says.

Professor Peter Wadhams, an expert on the disappearing Arctic ice, says that while countries in North America and Europe are ignoring the threat that changing weather patterns are causing to the world food supply, China is taking “self-protective action”.

He says that changes in the jet stream caused by the melting of the ice in the Arctic are threatening the most productive agricultural areas on the planet.

“The impact of extreme, often violent weather on crops in a world where the population continues to increase rapidly can only be disastrous,” he warns.

“Sooner or later, there will be an unbridgeable gulf between global food needs and our capacity to grow food in an unstable climate. Inevitably, starvation will reduce the world’s population.”

Land resources bought by China and Saudi representatives. Washington Post.

Protect food supply

Professor Wadhams, former head of the Polar Ocean Physics Group at the University of Cambridge, says China has already realised this is a threat to its future stability and has been taking over large areas of land in other countries to grow crops to protect its food supply.

The drawback, he says, is that the Chinese are introducing industrial agricultural practices that damage the soil, the water supply and the rivers.

“But China is positioning itself for the struggle to come − the struggle to find enough to eat,” he says. “By controlling land in other countries, they will control those countries’ food supply.”

Professor Wadhams, who is a former director of the Scott Polar Research Institute in Cambridge, is the UK’s most experienced sea ice expert.

In his new book, A Farewell to Ice, he describes a number of serious threats to the planet resulting from the loss of Arctic ice. These include much greater sea level rise than estimated by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), resulting in the flooding of cities and of low-lying deltas where much of the world’s food is grown.

“China is positioning itself for the struggle
to come − the struggle to find enough to eat”

He says China has seen the unrest in parts of the world caused by food price increases in 2011 during the Arab Spring, and has sought to guard against similar problems at home by buying land across the globe.

His warnings are echoed in Brazil, where there are concerns about Chinese plans to build a 3,300-mile (5,000km) railway to get soya, grain and timber to the coast to supply China’s needs.

But fears over land grabs by China are only a small part of the changing world that will be created by the loss of ice in the Arctic discussed by Wadhams in his book.

He attacks the last four British prime ministers − John Major, Tony Blair, Gordon Brown and David Cameron − for talking about climate change and doing little. And he says his fellow scientists on the IPCC are failing in their duty to speak out about the full dangers of climate change.

Professor Wadhams told Climate News Network that colleagues “were too frightened of their jobs or losing their grants to spell out what was really happening”. He said it makes him very angry that they are failing in their duty through timidity.

Based on his own measurements and calculations, he believes that summer ice in the Arctic will disappear before 2020 – which is 30 years before the IPCC estimate. He also believes that sea level rise has been badly underestimated because the loss of ice from Greenland and the Antarctic was not included in the IPCC’s estimates.

“My estimates are based on real measurements of the ice in the Arctic – the IPCC rely on computer simulations. I know which I believe.”

He is also concerned about the large escapes of methane from the Arctic tundra and the shallow seas north of Siberia – again, something that has not been fully taken into account in the IPCC’s calculations on the speed of warming.

Bordering on dishonest

“They know it is happening, but they do not want to frighten the horses [alarm people]. It is bordering on the dishonest,” he says.

Professor Wadhams has concluded that there is now so much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere that dangerous warming is inevitable unless more drastic action is taken. He says reducing emissions will help, along with planting forests, but it will never be enough.

“What is needed is something that has not been invented yet − a large-scale method of passing air through a machine and taking out the carbon dioxide,” he says.

“In the long run, only by taking carbon out of the air can we hope to get the concentrations down enough to save us from dangerous climate change.

“It is a tall order, but if we spend enough money on research we can find a way. Our future depends on it.”

Note to Commenters
Due to severe hacking attacks in the recent past that brought our site down for up to 11 days with considerable loss of circulation, we exercise extreme caution in the comments we publish, as the comment box has been one of the main arteries to inject malicious code. Because of that comments may not appear immediately, but rest assured that if you are a legitimate commenter your opinion will be published within 24 hours. If your comment fails to appear, and you wish to reach us directly, send us a mail at: editor@greanvillepost.com

We apologize for this inconvenience.

Nauseated by the
vile corporate media?
Had enough of their lies, escapism,
omissions and relentless manipulation?

Paul Street
A Strong Left Voice in Middle America

Robertson Creek. Credit: Billy Wilson – flickr.

Why Climate Change Trumps Nuclear War

[dropcap]O[/dropcap]ne of many disturbing moments in the first “presidential” “debate” between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump one week ago at Hofstra University came when the latter contender proclaimed dismissively that nuclear war, “not climate change,” posed the greatest threat to humanity today. His comment elicited no response from Mrs. Clinton or the debate moderator. There were no audible gasps from the audience.

Trump is wrong. Global warming is a bigger threat.

This might at first seem like a wild assertion. After all, a thermonuclear war – triggered, say, by escalated U.S. conflict with Russia and or China under a Hillary Clinton administration – would lead in one fell swoop to the death of billions. It would bring about the complete or almost complete eradication of human life and a habitable Earth (see the gruesome projections at Nucleardarkness.org). It would probably be best not to survive such a Holocaust. (It was nice to see Trump momentarily distance himself from longstanding U.S. policy of the right to first use of nuclear weapons. Too bad he backtracked and probably didn’t even know what he was saying anyway).

Anthropogenic climate change (Trump’s Chinese-imported “hoax”) will deliver no such sudden and total knockout blows. It will kill humanity (and other species humanity hasn’t already deep-sixed) off far more slowly than that. Nobody can plot with certainty the exact date when humanity’s destruction of livable ecology would lead it to join the tens of thousands of other species it has eradicated in the current and ongoing Sixth Great Extinction.

But there’s a big difference between the two great threats relating to time, differently understood, and hence to the urgency of action. In a world without climate change and other related and developing environmental catastrophes (ocean acidification, declining biodiversity, the disruption of nitrogen and phosphorous cycles and more), we could potentially live on with the specter of nuclear war hanging over heads for many more decades, centuries, and even millennia. It is, to be sure, something of a miracle that we haven’t blown ourselves up with nuclear weapons yet (we’ve come close on at least three occasions). And, yes, the statistical chance of us doing so increases with the amount of time nuclear warheads are allowed to exist.

Still there’s nothing inherent about the existence of nuclear weapons that they have to be used. And the threat they pose would disappear immediately at the moment when and if humanity decided to abolish and dismantle them. Nuclear weapons don’t accumulate unlivable amounts of nuclear war from one year to the next.   There’s no point whereupon nuclear weapons have been in existence for so long that nuclear annihilation becomes inevitable. As long as they stay in their silos, launchers, and bays, we still have a chance to survive decently.

Things are different with “anthropogenic” – really capitalogenic – climate change. The consensus earth science judgement is that our reigning fossil fuels-based economy can’t exist for very much longer without pushing livable ecology past “tipping points” and “planetary boundaries” that promise to make Earth unfit for decent human habitation. Nobody really knows how long humanity could survive the ecosystem collapse certain to occur if carbon emissions are permitted to push planetary warming beyond 2 degrees Celsius by 2036. It is clear, however, that global catastrophe looms if we breach the two-degree threshold. It won’t be pretty and again, survivors might find themselves wishing they hadn’t – survived, that is. (See this chilling [no irony or pun originally intended] Scientific American essay by the leading Earth scientist Michael E. Mann).

By the calculations of leading Earth scientist Michael Mann (see the last hyperlink), Greenhouse Gasses were already sufficiently prevalent in the atmosphere to warm the planet by 1.7 degrees Celsius two years ago. If we continue with business-as-usual emissions, we’ll push past 2 degrees in just two decades.

Bernie Sanders was right when he said during one of his debates with Hillary Clinton that climate change was the single greatest threat to the security of the American people. (It’s the best thing St. Bernard has ever said in his entire political career). The point can be extended to all of humanity.

The World War II Analogy

Averting environmental catastrophe means radically slashing carbon emissions immediately, not by 2030, not by 2050. Right now. The 2015 Paris climate agreement see carbon emission rising until 2030. That would be suicide. As the Earth Scientist and activist Stan Cox recently noted on Counterpunch, “in the real world, those emissions have to drop off a cliff right now. We must start abandoning fossil fuels much faster,” Cox adds, “than we [can] replace them with renewable sources…We must pull back…very soon or risk global calamity.” And that will mean, among other things, “fair-shares rationing” and price controls somewhat on the model of World War II, as part of a “a national reallocation of resources among sectors of production, one that diverts a significant share of necessarily declining resources budget into building green infrastructure and leaves the consumer economy a lot less to work with.”

My strong sense is that Cox is correct. Serious left (and other) environmentalists must not indulge in pie-in-the-sky talk about how everything will be okay if we just neatly switch out fossil fuels for water, wind, and solar power by 2050. No, sorry: 2050 is too late. And mass consumption is ruining livable land, water, and air in numerous other ways beyond climate change.

Senator Sanders and Bill McKibben are right to argue that we need to conceptualize the struggle against climate change in terms analogous to the World War II mobilization: a reconversion of the economy, this time not to make bombers, tanks, and naval destroyers but to make wind turbines and photovoltaic solar arrays and the like – renewable technologies that have become cheaper and more viable in recent years.

It’s not a new historical metaphor. “Surely,” Noam Chomsky wrote six years ago, “U.S. manufacturing industries could be reconstructed to produce…what the world needs, and soon, if we are to have some hope of averting major catastrophe. It has been done before, after all. During World War II, industry was converted to wartime production and the semi-command economy” (emphasis added) to defeat global fascism.

Seven years ago, Stanford engineering professor Mark Jacobson and University of California-Davis research scientist Mark Delucchi showed in Scientific American that humanity could convert to a completely renewable-based energy system by 2030 if nations would rely on technologies vetted by scientists rather than promoted by industries. Jacobson and Delucchi’s plan to have 100% of the world’s energy supplied by wind, water, and solar sources by 2030 called for millions of wind turbines, water machines, and solar installations. “The numbers are large,” they wrote, “but the scale is not an insurmountable hurdle: society has achieved massive transformations before. During World War II, the U.S. retooled its automobile factories to produce 300,000 aircraft, and other countries produced 486,000 more. In 1956, the U.S. began building the Interstate Highway System, which after 35 years extended for 47,000 miles, changing commerce and society” (emphasis added).

Where Cox rightly goes beyond McKibben’s recent call for a WWII-like mobilization to defeat the enemy of climate change is in the brutal honesty with which he argues that meeting the challenge will mean rapid and overall reductions in overall consumption, which will in turn require price controls, rations, and strictly progressive taxation “to prevent excess consumption by anyone.” It’s an important point: there is no sacrifice-free path to victory in the war against climate catastrophe.

The Only Candidate Who Gets It…Dragged Away by “Security”

Neither Trump nor Hillary Clinton (the preferred candidate of the nation’s unelected and interrelate dictatorships of money, empire, and eco-cide) are remotely on board with what is required – this even if it was nice to hear Hillary (a close campaign finance friend of the fracking industry) make positive reference to the need for “clean energy” jobs in her opening remarks in the horror show at Hofstra. The only U.S. presidential candidate who shows any serious understanding of what is required is the Green Party’s Jill Stein. Her party’s key policy demand is the Green New Deal, which combines a giant livable ecology-saving program of national energy and economic reconversion with a giant jobs program and universal health insurance paid for by genuinely progressive taxation (long overdue in “New Gilded Age” America) and massive reductions in the nation’s giant Pentagon System, which accounts for half the world’s military spending. (It was a predictable shame that Bernie Sanders made no space in his campaign and platform for a serious critique of the U.S. Pentagon System, the world’s single largest carbon emitter and an agent and enforcer of U.S.-led planetary petro-capitalism.)

Ms. Stein was escorted off the site of the presidential debate by Hofstra University Security personnel and the Nassau County police.

Nothing Else Will Matter

Meanwhile back here in the Northern Great Plains and in the Upper Midwest (I am writing in Iowa City, Iowa) – notably now in the high holy presidential-electoral state of Iowa – activists of various political stripes (“Bernie or Busters,” Lesser Evil Hillary voters, more enthusiastic Hillary voters, Green Party/Stein backers, anarchists, “constitutionalists,” and even a Tea Partier or two) are united in an epic struggle with the Texas-based pipeline giant Energy Transfer Partners (ETP). ETP is trying to construct a long eco-cidal “black snake” – the Dakota Access Bakken Pipeline (DAPL) – to carry fracked oil from the environmentally catastrophic Bakken oil fields across southern North Dakota, South Dakota, and Iowa to central Illinois. The DAPL has met fierce resistance from thousands of First Nations (Native American) and other “water protectors” and “pipeline fighters.” For these frontline North American soldiers in the global war against Big Carbon’s campaign to Greenhouse Gas life on Earth to death (a crime that could make the Nazis look like amateurs at Evil), the struggle to keep fossil fuels in the ground goes on before, during, and after the quadrennial candidate-centered major party electoral carnival. They understand the need for grassroots politics and activism beneath and beyond the election cycle, whatever its outcomes.

Protecting livable ecology is not these activists’ only concern. They sense correctly, however, that unless we avert the ever more imminent environmental catastrophe being led by climate change, none of the many and other related things progressives care about are going to matter all that much. Who wants to fight for the more just and equal sharing out of poisoned pie? This is a war to save prospects for a decent future. And strange as it may at first sound, winning that war is even a bigger priority right now than the necessary struggle for nuclear disarmament.

Paul Street

Independent radical-democratic policy researcher, journalist, historian, author and speaker based in Iowa City, Iowa, and Chicago, Illinois. He is the author of seven books to date, including: Empire and Inequality: America and the World Since 9/11 (Boulder, CO: Paradigm, 2004); Racial Oppression in the Global Metropolis: a Living Black Chicago History (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2007); The Empire’s New Clothes: Barack Obama in the Real World of Power (Paradigm, 2010); (with Anthony DiMaggio) Crashing the Tea Party: Mass Media and the Campaign to Remake American Politics (Paradigm, 2011); They Rule: The 1% v. Democracy (Paradigm, September 2014). His essays, articles, reviews, interviews, and commentaries have appeared in numerous outlets political, media, and academic. Visit his website,  Paul Street

=SUBSCRIBE TODAY! NOTHING TO LOSE, EVERYTHING TO GAIN.=
free • safe • invaluable

BY RYAN KORONOWSKI
THINKPROGRESS.ORG

CLIMATE DENIERS

Few politicians represent the reactionary and utterly corrupt nature of US politics better than Oklahoma’s senator Jim Inhofe. Owned by the oil industry, among other things, everything this man has done and still does represents a crime to humanity and nature: from being a servile agent for the imperialist war machine to a climate denier, Inhofe has not failed in his call to serve the interests of the plutocracy. In this pic, he holds forth during a trip to Ukraine, Washington’s latest outpost for international mischief and saber-rattling. Knowing this piece of filth we don’t have to ask what he was doing there. Something bad, obviously, at clueless taxpayers’ expense.

Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-OK), the chair of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, is a famous climate denier. He has written a book about global warming, arguing it is a hoax. Like many Americans — 64 percent of which are concerned about climate change — Inhofe’s granddaughter wants to know why he does not understand the science.

On the last day of the Republican National Convention in Cleveland last week, Inhofe told radio host Eric MeTaxas about a conversation he had with one of his granddaughters, Right Wing Watchreported on Tuesday.

You know, our kids are being brainwashed? I never forget because I was the first one back in 2002 to tell the truth about the global warming stuff and all of that. And my own granddaughter came home one day and said “Popi (see “I” is for Inhofe, so it’s Momi and Popi, ok?), Popi, why is it you don’t understand global warming?” I did some checking and Eric, the stuff that they teach our kids nowadays, you have to un-brainwash them when they get out.

Right now, the United States, including Oklahoma, is in the middle of a record-breaking heat wavethat has left at least six dead. This month, the world learned that the first half of 2016 was thehottest start to a year on record, building on 2015’s record as the hottest year on record — data that strengthen the longer trends signifying the reality of climate change.

You don’t have to be an educated person to be a professional politico in the US, nor have any sense of decency, for that matter. Here Inhofe “proves” that global warming is a hoax.

Famously, Inhofe brought a snowball onto the senate floor last year in an effort to prove that global warming was a hoax, citing the cold “unseasonable” temperatures. This was in February.

In 2010, Inhofe brought his grandchildren to the National Mall in Washington, D.C. during a large snowstorm to build an igloo, calling it “Al Gore’s New Home.”

Two years ago, Oklahoma approved the Oklahoma Academic Skills for Science, academic standards which had been developed over a year and a half by teachers, community members, and business representatives. The state adopted them despite serious opposition from some in the Oklahoma legislature who objected to teaching kids about climate change, among other things.

The Inhofe family and their igloo. (CREDIT: INHOFE SENATE WEBSITE)

Others objected to the fact that the Next Generation Science Standards — national guidelines for science education that include the teaching of climate science and evolution — had been used as a resource for the Oklahoma standards.

“There’s been a lot of criticisms, in some sectors, as to maybe some of the hyperbole — what some consider hyperbole relative to climate change. I know it’s a very very difficult, very controversial subject,” Oklahoma Rep. Mark McCullough said, going on to ask, “do you believe that those sections specifically relating to weather and climate particularly at the earlier ages…could potentially be utilized to implicate into some pretty young impressionable minds, a fairly-one sided view as to that controversial subject, a subject that’s very much in dispute among even the academics?”

When Inhofe took the gavel of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee in January 2015, his first speech that day highlighted the few scientists who dispute the massive consensus that human activity causes global warming.

The answer to his grandaughter’s question — why Inhofe does not understand global warming — may be unknowable. However her “Popi’s” record may provide a clue. Inhofe has received over $2 million dollars from the dirty energy industry. At the same time, Oklahoma leads the nation (beat only by Texas) with the highest number of natural disaster declarations from climate-related causes, over the last five years.

This is only likely to get worse as large parts of the Southwest and Midwest dry out as the impacts of climate change kicks in — something that will disproportionately impact the lives of the youngest generation compared to that of older senators from Oklahoma.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Ryan Koronowski is Editor of ClimateProgress. He grew up on the north shore of Massachusetts and graduated from Vassar College with dual degrees in psychology and political science, focusing on foreign policy and social persuasion. He earned his M.S. in energy policy and climate at Johns Hopkins University. Previously, he was the research director and rapid response manager at the Climate Reality Project. He has worked on Senate and presidential campaigns, predominantly doing political research and rapid response. 

Note to Commenters
Due to severe hacking attacks in the recent past that brought our site down for up to 11 days with considerable loss of circulation, we exercise extreme caution in the comments we publish, as the comment box has been one of the main arteries to inject malicious code. Because of that comments may not appear immediately, but rest assured that if you are a legitimate commenter your opinion will be published within 24 hours. If your comment fails to appear, and you wish to reach us directly, send us a mail at: editor@greanvillepost.com

We apologize for this inconvenience. 

=SUBSCRIBE TODAY! NOTHING TO LOSE, EVERYTHING TO GAIN.=
free • safe • invaluable

Nauseated by the
vile corporate media?
Had enough of their lies, escapism,
omissions and relentless manipulation?

By ALEXANDRA GENOVA FOR DAILYMAIL.COM
Inside the Ark are museum-style exhibits: displays of Noah’s family along with rows of cages containing animal replicas, including dinosaurs. But the project has been criticized by pro-science groups who say it is based on a myth

‘The kids are being brainwashed’: Bill Nye the Science Guy slams new Noah’s Ark attraction during a visit Friday after protests were held at its opening

• A 155 metre-long, $100 million Noah’s ark attraction built by an Australian creationist will opened Thursday
• Bill Nye the Science Guy visited the ark Friday and said he worried that it is danger to the nation’s science education
• Ken Ham, president of Answers in Genesis, says the ark is built based on dimensions in the Bible
• Ham and Nye engaged in a two hour debate during the visit, in which they discussed creationism vs evolution 
• Inside are displays of Noah’s family along with rows of cages containing animal replicas, including dinosaurs
• Supporters of science and the theory of evolution are planning a protest outside the park on Thursday 
• They claim it is detrimental to the teaching of science and should not have got an $18m state tax incentive
  

Science educator Bill Nye took a tour of a new Noah’s Ark attraction in Kentucky that he has called a danger to the nation’s science education.

Answers in Genesis president Ken Ham invited Nye, best known for his 1990s science TV show, to visit the Ark Encounter on Friday.

The Christian group says the ark is part of its ministry that teaches Old Testament stories as true historical events.

Nye toured the ark with his own film crew and the pair engaged in an unscheduled debate discussing creationism versus evolution in front of hundreds of people.

Nye ‘The Science Guy’ told The Washington Post that his takeaway from the visit was that the kids were being ‘brainwashed’. 

He added: ‘This could be just a charming piece of Americana, just something — I recently used an app called Roadtrippers that takes you to odd or unusual places…but this is much more serious than that.

‘This guy promotes so very strongly that climate change is not a serious problem, that humans are not causing it, that some deity will see to it that everything is ok.’

Meanwhile Ham wrote in a Facebook post: ‘Bill challenged me about the content of many of our exhibits, and I challenged him about what he claimed and what he believed. It was a clash of world views. At one point I asked Bill: “What would happen to you when you die?” He said: ‘When you die “you’re done”.’

He added: ‘We both agreed to video the entire discussion as we walked. Numerous children, teens, and adults swarmed around us as we passionately interacted as the audience grew.’

The president of Answers in Genesis said that those who gathered around the pair as they walked and talked later ‘prayed for Bill’. 

Teenagers and adults also came up and spoke with Nye, asked him questions and ‘challenged him’ according to Ham.

He also said he ‘had the opportunity’ to share the gospel with Nye a number of times.

[dropcap]W[/dropcap]hen Ham suggested that Nye speak to Answers in Genesis’s team of scientists, Nye said they were ‘all incompetent’. 

Ham asked Nye if they could be friends, but Nye replied that they ‘could be acquaintances with mutual respect, but not friends.’ Ham described the two-hour encounter as ‘fruitful and exciting’ and said they ended the talk with a friendly handshake. 

The two first became acquainted when they engaged in an online debate in 2014. After the debate, Nye said he hoped the ark would never be built, because it would ‘indoctrinate children into this extraordinary and outlandish, unscientific point of view.’

The attraction opened to the public Thursday, after a group of Christians – who believe every word of the Bible – cut the ribbon on the 510-foot-long (155 metre) version of Noah’s Ark which cost more than $100 million to build. 

The ark, in rural Kentucky about 20 miles south of Cincinnati, has been criticized by evolutionists, who say it will be detrimental to science education.

But Australian Ham said he believed it would be one of the ‘greatest Christian outreaches of this era in history.’

Since its announcement in 2010, the ark project has rankled opponents who say the attraction should not have won state tax incentives.

A protest was held outside ark on Thursday and hundreds gathered with placards that read ‘A tax-payer funded flood of lies and hate. What a disaster!’ and ‘This fable won’t float’, while people chanted ‘One, two, three four, we don’t want your ark no more.’