Op Ed by Helge Nome
The phrase "Climate Change" has been relegated to the back benches here in Alberta, Canada. People that are part of the prevailing political establishment don't even mention the phrase any more, in order to avoid possible controversy.
The attitude seems to be:"The climate is always changing anyway, so what is the big deal?"
The underlying driver of this attitude is a lack of trust by a significant percentage of the population in the ideas and beliefs of another significant percentage of the population.
Meanwhile data is being gathered systematically all over the world by eyes and instrumentation that tell the story:
We are warming up and drying out
No "ifs" or "buts" about it. And it applies to continents, rather that just my own little (dry)fishbowl here in Central Alberta, where the disappearance of wetlands is painfully obvious.
Meanwhile, the attention of the establishment, hand in hand with mainstream media, has shifted solidly onto financial preoccupations, in the wake of Donald Trump's bullying down south.
"We are going to double our exports of oil and gas, build pipelines, etc., etc.,"
It so happens that this kind of activity demands an awful lot of water which is disappearing from under our feet at an accelerating and alarming rate.
Here in Central Alberta we live in a semi arid area with decreasing annual overall precipitation and would do well to heed the history of past droughts, the last major one of which reduced the population of East Central Alberta from some 30,00 people about 100 years ago to about 6,000 at the present time.
Would it help if we cry "Drought!" instead of "Climate Change"?
For us county folk perhaps. For city folks? I doubt it.
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