- By KERRY JACKSON
- 10/12/2016
Their impatient craving for a crisis was summed up well two years ago in August when a fellow named Greg Blanchette tweeted that he “kind of” hoped that North America “gets its ass kicked this hurricane season. It would motivate us on climate action.”
Is this the same Greg Blanchette who proposed that service stations be forced to placefrightening global warming warnings on gas-pump nozzles, an idea that’s now law in North Vancouver, British Columbia? Maybe not. But it doesn’t matter. If they’re not the same person, it simply means there are two climate cranks running loose out there with the same name.
A couple of years before Blanchette was wishing for wreck and ruin, British naturalist David Attenborough said that “disaster” was needed to wake people up to the threat of climate change.
The “disasters” the U.S. had experience up to that point “with hurricanes and floods”, he said, “doesn’t do it,” so the crisis he was been hoping for must be truly cataclysmic.
On Friday, as Matthew barreled up Florida’s coast, Marshall Shepherd, a professor in atmospheric sciences at the University of Georgia, tweeted about the “ridiculous complaining” he was seeing about the hurricane being less severe than expected.
“Some seem disappointed there isn’t tragic loss of life/apocalyptic,” he said.