We dun fuck’d up

It’s like mother earth, gaia, god, mother nature, whatever…. has been trying to tell us something. Trying desperately to warn us about something. But for the most part we ignored it. We’ve seen too many of those movies where the peoples ignore mother earth’s pleas for help until a single savior, a chosen one emerges, changes everyone minds, sets everything right and we all live happily ever after.
So we sat on our asses and waited for the chosen one. But he never came.
And then within a week, this week, three news stories come out. They make a ripple in the mainstream media, but go largely ignored.
Individually they are the same-old, same-old that we’ve become so desensitized to. But put together, or even appearing within the same week, it’s hard not to connect the dots.

High gas prices push record Exxon profit

“U.S. gasoline prices of more than $3 a gallon helped Exxon Mobil post a record $39.5 billion profit Thursday, the largest annual profit ever for a U.S. company.”

Welch: Interference in science "stunning"

U.S. Rep. Peter Welch says it was a "stunning personal experience" to hear federal scientists say they had been stymied from talking about climate change.

The House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, on which Welch serves, is holding hearings on the administration's handling of the global warming issue. The panel's chairman, Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., said the administration appeared to want "to mislead the public by injecting doubt into the science of global warming."

Welch said he had read about scientists being muzzled, but, "It's a stunning personal experience to hear directly from scientists whose life work has been compromised, who live in fear of retaliation or compromised careers if they adhere to their code of ethics as scientists."

The survey found nearly half the scientists had seen or experienced pressure to delete words like "global warming" from written material. About 40 percent said thad had seen changes to materials that changed their scientific meanings.

The White House maintains it was trying to bring balance to reports on global warming.


Climate Change Predictions Not Exaggerated, Analysis Says

In recent years actual concentrations of carbon dioxide—a greenhouse gas linked to global warming—have followed almost exactly the projections of the 2001 IPCC report.

If anything, the IPCC may have underestimated some climate threats in 2001. For example, actual temperatures were at the high end of the predicted range. And sea levels have actually risen faster than the predicted.

"There has long been a muttering, out in the blogosphere and other places, that the scientists have been exaggerating and trying to scare people so as to generate more research money," he said.

"If you wish to accuse scientists of systematic error, Rahmstorf et al show that we have been a bit conservative, and clearly not alarmist," Alley added.

The report is also expected to say these changes are mostly due, with a 90 percent certainty, to human-caused emission of greenhouse gases.

"I hope this report will shock people, governments into taking more serious action," Rejendra Pachauri, the IPCC chairman, told Reuters news agency last week.


Global warming to last for 1,000 years: report

Humans have already left such a deep footprint on the environment that the effects of global warming will last for the next 1,000 years, according to a draft copy of a new report.

The report says heat waves, droughts and rain storms, as well as violent typhoons and hurricanes, will become more frequent.

The report paints a startling picture of the effects of climate change and says evidence of the phenomenon is now "unequivocal."

It says human influence on the atmosphere during the 21st century alone will propel global warming for another 1,000 years, based on estimates of how long it will take nature to clean the air of gases that contribute to climate change.

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So not only did we fuck things up
we did it because of money
and then we had the avarice and arrogance to try to cover it up
and we fucked it up bad enough that it will take at least 1000 years to set right