Tom Toles for March 02, 2020

I dunno. Rising sea level, glaciers calving further and further toward the poles, more energetic storms, jet streams with greater uncertainty about their paths… what could possibly go wrong?

Seeing as how Trump is working to downplay the coronavirus and trying to brand anyone who talks about the dangers of it as someone who’s just trying to bring down Trump, I doubt calling the climate crisis a pandemic would have much effect.

Yeah, the word “catastrophic“ never caught on.

We’re Fired – {3 beats/line}

Climate-change and a virus

and all kinds of mishaps retire us

from our job of running the planet.

It can’t get much worse, now can it …

… Quoth Mother Nature: “You’re FIRED!!

Of your bunglings I’m SO VERY TIRED!!”

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

A commenter to WaPo’s Toles’toon-site posts this delicious song-parody: – “Super-callous-narcissistic-xenophobic-POTUS! Even just the sound of it is something quite atrocious! … .“ – O_C

“Backspace”

.

The world is topsy-turvy, then it’s turvy-topsy;

Volcanoes all go popsy, the oceans slipsy slopsy.

The dark clouds chase each other, wild winds blow them hither,

Then they backtrack thither. Who knows next to whither?

.

The animals stampeding, movements becoming frantic.

No time for things romantic; extinctions are gigantic.

And humans wonder thus: Are all these things so frightly

Blamed upon us rightly? Ever back together tightly?

.

Then the world as known dissolves, what’s now was never often.

Rules once established soften. Horizontal degrees much off then.

The world-as-will then ceases: Its ideas disperse as motes,

Into Chaos realms each floats — As the Darkness feeds and gloats.

“Next!”

.

Hurricanes, floods, and earthquakes — Oh my!

The ground cracks apart, bright bolts wrench the sky.

Such a surprise to some it will be,

Buried alive or drowned in the sea.

.

How moronic it was to ignore warnings dire

That glaciers would melt, the trees crinkle in fire.

For reasons their own, our leaders declaimed

Things weren’t as bad as the doom criers claimed.

.

Thus the end of our world came soon to pass

Due to rising percentage of greenhouse gas

That made the Earth nearly unlivable.

Would such a thing be ever forgivable?

.

Who left to forgive, left forgiving to be?

Not anything looking like you or like me.

If Somethings appear to take our place,

May they act more sane than our damned human race!

“Climate change?” A sad & deliberate euphemism. “Global warming?” Profound understatement. “Global roasting?” That’s more like it, and it ain’t getting any better…

I love these poems/songs! What ever happened to Fawkes, BTW? He also posted a lot of parodies, but he disappeared. Did the Mods ban him?

Trump called COVID-19 a hoax. It worked for him with climate change.

A “hoax” by any other name, still gets a tweet!

“Hoaxes and Witch Hunts and Viruses, Oh my!”

Unfortunately, somewhere along the line the righties got hold of the otherwise admirable idea “the most effective way to cope with change is to help create it” and figured it applied to the climate.

Still won’t work for #45, who is denying the pandemic, too.

And it would be far worse than understating it, I’m afraid – it would imply there’s an easy “cure” or “vaccine” for it. I wish.

All this hand wringing will not change the fact that folk are not willing to pay the price to do much about it. Folk are not willing to give up.. heating/cooling your house.. bottled water.. clothes.. driving.. driving/walking on pavement.. elevators.. hot water.. food you did not grow yourself.. concrete.. electricity. In fact just about everything.

We can not go back but the only way our species can live without substantially changing the earth.. would be to go back to our hunter-gatherer roots. But perhaps.. in the distant future we may go back to the lifestyle that kept our species going for 600,000 odd years.

So what can we do to permanently prevent another incompetent person becoming president? It’s obvious that the parties are either satisfied with the status quo, or powerless to change it, so We The People are going to have to make the change if we want to preserve democracy.

I’m surprised DFT hasn’t promised a vaccine in “a couple of weeks” yet. He’s pulled that one dozens of times, and never been called on it.

The Reichstag can ignore anything it wishes to, no matter what it’s called.

God help us all! When the chips are down, We end up with a destroyer……

{Off-topic:} – Here’re a coupla news-magazine items: 1 “The Atlantic’s” George Packer describes HOW “The President is Winning His War on American Institutions”: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/04/how-to-destroy-a-government/606793/ … … 2 Searchline something like “Andy Borowitz archives” to get his clever satires at: https://www.newyorker.com/humor/borowitz-report .

Four more years of republican denial will be enough to kill civilization as we know it.

Save the earth, never vote for any lying and greedy Republican for anything.

A talk that makes the points about AGW that are often neglected:

https://www.ted.com/talks/angelicque_white_what_ocean_microbes_reveal_about_the_changing_climate

And here is an article showing the climate denial being distributed by a Trumpie at the Dept. of the Interior:

https://www.yahoo.com/news/trump-insider-embeds-climate-denial-131113056.html

Don’t worry. We don’t need to rename it anything. Biden is going to be the Democratic nominee and he’s going to fix it all with his plan to do absolutely nothing. Yep, and the “liberal” media is overjoyed because they’ll keep their tax cuts. Probably force the government to buy their soon-to-be-flooded homes at premium prices too because when haven’t the rich done that? Oh well, the house is on fire, but why bother pointing that out since it requires rich people and their media puppets to give a crap. Just elect another do-nothing. Republicans get to nominate people that do exactly what their voters want them to do, but we have to settle for people that won’t do anything or do the Republican option because the Democratic option would help the bottom 50%.