Still inconvenient

Uncle Jerry doesn’t do vacations. There’s little need, he thinks, after having checked out completely from 1965 to 1978. The heights of Kenya to the flats of Utah—been there, done that, logged it. Which is convenient, as far as keeping down the ol’ carbon footprint in check, or so those bloggers say.

My point is that yer sweet Auntie R. is on the lam this week, thereby explaining old Uncle J. rearing his dusty keyboard for another whack at the ol’ 300-worder.

Good thing I’ve something to tap-tap about: I just looked up from Al Gore’s recent Rolling Stone epic.

The former vice-president marathoner comes complete with Gore-y details: “Nine of the 10 hottest years in history have occurred in the last 13 years.” “Megafloods displaced 20 million people in Pakistan.” Rain “caused a ‘thousand year’ flood in [Gore’s] home city of Nashville.” “All-time record flood levels in the Mississippi River Valley.” “Historic drought and fires in Russia killed an estimated 56,000 people.” “The majority of the counties in Texas were on fire.” “Extreme droughts in central China and northern France.”

“An enormous mass of ice, four times larger than the island of Manhattan, broke off from northern Greenland last year and slipped into the sea.”

But Gore hedges his criticism of President Barack Obama, calling him a “special case.” Yes, Obama passed green stimulus funds. No, he did nothing to stop Congress when they “decimated its funding.”

But for ol’ Al, it’s a bigger, cultural problem: We just don’t give a damn about each other anymore. Gore writes: “We haven’t gone nuts—but the ‘conversation of democracy’ has become so deeply dysfunctional that our ability to make intelligent collective decisions has been seriously impaired.”

Unlike most sky-is-falling types, however, he offers solutions: Become an advocate for climate change, reduce your own energy consumption in a meaningful way, join a group or organization, call out the media when they “put out claptrap” on climate change. And “finally, and above all, don’t give up on the political system.”

That, or you can just hunker on down in your hole, kinda like the one I just shimmied out from.