They've always happened, just not so many and so frequently. In the UK alone, the flooding of recent years has been frequent and beyond previous extremes.
The latest disaster has been in Cumbria, in northern England. This is the county of the picturesque Lake District.
On Friday, this is what the village of Cockermouth looked like:
The entire ground floors of buildings were filled with floodwater. People had to break through their roofs to achieve rescue.This bridge is not something from a Californian earthquake. It's in the town of Workington, close to Cockermouth. It is one of six that collapsed in the floods. A seventh is in danger of collapsing at any moment.
There was a police officer directing traffic away from the bridge at the time it collapsed. Bill Barker was killed trying to save others.
Every bridge in the flooded zone is being checked by engineers. I can't even begin to imagine the logistics of that operation.I for one have no doubt that climate change is to blame for these extreme climate events. Many of them have taken place in the US. Thanks to the climate change denier George W. Bush, the US, the main creator of the carbon emissions that are damaging the planet probably beyond repair has done nothing official to halt and then reverse the pollution trend that will kill the Earth. Barack Obama has taken astonishingly little action despite election pledges. He may not even attend the climate change conference later in the month in Copenhagen. Both on an industrial and a doemstic scale, the US continues to act as if it has a god-given right to continue to burn as much in the way of fossil fuels as it likes, in order to maintain its lifestyle.
That lifestyle is not sustainable. Why take the rest of the planet with you, US, just because you are too selfish to live in marginally less comparative luxury, in order to save the poorest of the world from starvation and the wildlife from extinction?
7 comments:
It's November and last week we had at day 66.2 F. Crazy, isn't it?!?!
I'm glad that we don't have snow (hate that white stuff), but this extreme weather situation frightens me.
If Obama doesn't step up to the plate and start to take a leading role in addressing climate change, it will certainly be one more nail in his coffin, as far as I'm concerned (as well as a nail in ALL our coffins). With all of the natural disasters we've faced in recent years, I don't understand how he can NOT make this a priority.
I'm so embarrassed to be American.
I don't understand how climate change can't be a priority for everyone...if we all do a little bit we can make a big diference.
I haven't been to Cockermouth, but we have visited Cumbria in the past..my heart goes out to everyone there..it really is hard to imagine what they had to deal with
those poor people - my heart thoughts and prayers go out to them
as for mr obama - don't get me started - i've already had a rant about climate change with one american friend this evening, just adding it to the list of all things wrong with the world's supposed foremost leading nation - especially after my rant last week about lack of employment rights - next thing will be their health care, which unless they sort out global warming will be an even more sore issue
Not wishing to belittle the terrible floods in the Lake District, but as someone has pointed out in a letter to my newspaper today, this is neither 'new' nor 'unique' for Cockermouth. There were devastating floods in 1761, 1771, 1852, 1874, 1918, 1931, 1932, 1966 AND 2005.
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