RIP Walter Cronkite

Walter Cronkite, 2004: Global warming needs a serious look right now | www.azstarnet.com ®

The contempt of the Bush administration for environmentalists and their concerns certainly is well enough known by now.

While the evidence of man-made environmental damage continues to mount, the Bush team stubbornly resists its implications like a defeated army whose rear guard fights off its pursuers as it retreats.

That has been especially true of its handling of the most serious of all the environmental issues - global warming.
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...This theory also starts with the melting of glaciers and sea ice but involves the dilution of seawater's salinity - or salt content - that results.

That salt content is a key element in an ocean current that takes heat from the tropics northward and cold water southward and in the process moderates temperatures in the Eastern United States and much of Europe. The collapse of this so-called conveyor could, in the worst case, produce a new ice age.

The best case would give us severe winters, increasingly violent storms, flooding, drought and high winds around the globe, disrupting food production and energy supplies and raising sea levels high enough to flood coastal cities and make them unlivable.

Walter Cronkite, 2005: Global Warming: Why I Am Marching

...The governments of the world have tarried long enough, and the United States is scarcely without doubt the greatest culprit among them.

We the people have the strength to bring our country from our weak-kneed stumbling gait in the last ranks of reason to the leadership of the great march to environmental victory.

I want to be in that parade and if there is a place up front I'd wish to lead the band or at least be assigned a big bass drum to help pound out the rhythm of glorious success.